24 fragmentation and vote-selling? Or of problems of weak sanctioning power of voters because of state-led violence and coercion in elections?

**_Mass media:_** The potential role of media organizations, such as radio, seems obvious as purveyors of information to large numbers of citizens, especially the poor. Indeed, donors have been engaged in setting-up and supporting community radio in various parts of Africa to broadcast public-interest programming for democratic values, human rights, and the importance of health and education. Yet, there is little rigorous evidence of their impact; recent work using new and unique data from Benin yields surprising conclusions for the advocates of community radio. Keefer and Khemani (2011a, 2011b) find that greater access to community radio in Benin is _not_ associated with the ability of citizens to extract greater benefits from their government; instead, the impact of radio programming seems to be to persuade people to invest more of their own private resources into the education of their children and the health of their family. While this is a useful role for mass media to play in development, it is unrelated to the accountability challenge.

This contrasts with evidence from the post-Depression-era USA, when radio had just begun to spread, that greater access to radio enabled citizens to receive greater benefits from government welfare spending (Stromberg, 2004). It also contrasts with the experience from Uganda and elsewhere when media were used purposefully to disseminate information about leakage in public resources; in such cases they were instrumental in stimulating public opinion and action to reduce such leakage (Reinikka and Svensson, 2005, as discussed above). This suggests that investments in building capacity of media alone, and advocating their independence from the state, may not be sufficient to achieve greater accountability—investing further in well-designed messages, either those that can enable voters to coordinate on policy performance, or those that are endorsed by the state in an effort to improve efficiency in its public spending (as in the Brazil examples discussed above) is needed.

Although theory suggests an accountability role for mass media, it also suggests that media could be used for political “posturing” and “pandering”, reducing incentives to pursue actions that contribute to broad public goods. (Prat, 2005; Besley and Prat, 2006; Mullainathan and Shleifer, 2002; Maskin and Tirole, 2004). For example, when there is uncertainty about the effects of different policies, and policymakers/politicians as “experts” have access to greater private information about these different effects than do voters, media coverage may induce politicians to take positions that cater to voter beliefs, ignoring their private information that could lead to better policy decisions.

The policy _mantra_ for media development for accountability seems to be to pursue laws and regulations for media independence from state control, which while probably necessary doesn't address other incentive issues in competitive media markets. First, even independent media may be manipulated by governments seeking to broadcast propaganda messages, or because politicians service the partisan interests of media owners—that is, independent media can be "lapdogs" rather than "watchdogs"(Qian and Yanagizawa, 2010). Second, media have