Rewarding Loyalty: Committee Assignment in Kenya's National Assembly

What is the logic of committee assignment in Kenya's National Assembly? Conventional wisdom holds that committee work is an important means of expanding legislative time and facilitating specialization and issue area expertise. Consequently, committee assignments by party leaders ought to reflect legislators’ issue expertise and general electoral incentives. This paper tests the validity of these assumptions using data from Kenya. First, it shows that committee meetings in the National Assembly overwhelmingly focus on oversight hearings, rather than to advance bills. Second, it demonstrates that party loyalists are more likely to be appointed to watchdog committees than to department committees. Qualitative evidence suggests that oversight committees create opportunities for legislators to extract informal payments from the targets of their investigation. The paper then contextualizes these findings in the context of the industrial organization of the Kenyan legislature. Overall, the premium attached to oversight functions reflects the limited powers of departmental committees to compel executive agencies to act through legislation and other policy directives. Therefore, oversight powers are a source of leverage in dealing with executive agencies, and it is for this reason that parties tend to reward loyalists through appointment to watchdog committees.