coefficient is not significant at the usual levels. In contrast, the quality of these projects is substantially lower than their comparators. Projects with politicians on the relevant committee are 12 percentage points less likely to be of satisfactory quality, against a baseline of 81 percent. Politicians use their formal power over the bureaucracy to initiate projects but not to complete them, and at the cost of their quality.

Using data on the key steps in the project formulation, budgeting and implementation phases, the analysis highlights that politicians pressure budget officers to release funds for projects in their constituencies earlier in the project cycle, and then put pressure on implementing officers to select particular contractors and divert project funds.<sup>3</sup> The results imply that they do this through their positions on the sectoral oversight committees, as officials report less personal engagement with national legislators. These results are consistent with political oversight reducing bureaucratic inaction, but at the cost of political distortions to the technocratic process.

The evidence presented is consistent with pre-existing results on avenues of influence in terms of the limited constituency appropriation effects of committee membership (Berry and Fowler, 2015) and extends this logic to design features of the projects and their implementation progress. Further, it provides evidence of the influence of politicians on disbursements and on substantial shifts in the general equilibrium of the political engagements that make up the project implementation environment. The breadth of analysis, encompassing each of the key points in the service delivery chain, provides a framework in which to tie together results in the wider literature on political intervention in the bureaucracy.

The results provide detailed empirical evidence on the trade-offs arising from granting politicians greater powers over bureaucratic implementation of public projects. Iyer and Mani (2012) use administrative data on the careers of Indian civil servants to show how politicians affect the process of bureaucratic assignment across public organizations. I document a related margin of interaction: keeping bureaucrats in the same organizations, politicians pressure them through their formal committee positions for political or personal ends.<sup>4</sup> The paper also provides further detail on how the nature of political intervention is key to its impacts.<sup>5</sup> Gulzar and Pasquale (2017) use overlapping jurisdictions in India to show that implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is substantially better where bureaucrats answer to a single politician, implying that appropriately concentrated incentives can boost the performance of the bureaucracy. Nath (2014) shows that politicians with longer-tenures in power are able to improve the performance of bureaucrats by providing longer-term, perhaps dynamic, incentives. Identifying where in the service delivery chain politicians are able to shift the bureaucratic process provides insights into the de facto nature of government.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 overviews the relevant aspects of the Nigerian government that define the environment in which politicians and bureaucrats interact. Section 3 then describes the data the analysis relies on. Section 4 outlines my empirical strategy for each stage of the analysis and the corresponding results. Section 5 provides concluding comments and discussion. The

> 3Ting (2012) provides a theoretical framework that lays out the tension between politicians’ direct control of constituency funds, and the involvement of bureaucratic experts in distributing public resources. This paper provides detailed micro-level evidence that powerful politicians do not face a discrete trade-off, but rather use their power to distort the implementing environment of the bureaucracy for political gain.

> 4The World Bank’s Public Officials Surveys (Manning et al., 2000) provide descriptive evidence that political interactions with bureaucrats are significant across the developing world. I provide evidence on a key element of this relationship and quantify its impacts on government productivity. These issues feed into a wider literature on the determinants of public sector productivity. A different approach to the analysis of productivity in the Nigerian Federal Government is taken in Rasul and Rogger (2018). There, we assess how differences in management practice, the formal rules of organization, underlie differences in productivity.

> 5Pepinsky et al. (2017) provide an overview of the small theoretical and applied literature on this topic. Khemani (2015) provides evidence from both cross-country and Philippine-specific data that broad political incentives determine the extent of political interaction with the bureaucracy. She finds that settings in which politicians purchase political support through targeted transfers have lower levels of public service provision.

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