The results in Tables 4 and 5 are strong evidence that access to a type of media that is known to carry programming aimed at increasing the demand for particular health and education services leads respondents to prefer politicians who promise to improve these particular services relative to politicians who promise to provide patronage jobs. There is no association between access to other types of radio, that do not carry the same level of public interest programming as do community radio, and citizen preferences for targeted jobs relative to health and education. In the following section we provide evidence that radio access has these effects because it increases the demand for broadly delivered public services, not because it reduces the taste for clientelist benefits.

# **6. Mechanisms of Radio Impact**

The findings in Tables 4 and 5 raise two questions about the mechanisms through which community radio exerts an effect on preferences for clientelist politicians. The first is whether the effects of community radio emerge because its programming reduces citizen preferences for clientelist promises or rather, as we contend, community radio programming increases preferences for public services that clientelist politicians under-provide. The evidence reported in the previous section cannot isolate radio’s effects on attitudes to clientelism, _per se_ because it is designed to compare clientelist benefits to non-clientelist ones. We employ another vignette suited to measuring citizen attitudes to clientelism alone: vote buying, for which the trade-off with non-clientelist benefits are far from clear.

The second is whether the mechanism of radio’s impact is indeed through households listening to, and being influenced by, the programming carried on it. We show that those who actually listen to community radio have different preferences than those who do not; and those with better access to community radio are more knowledgeable about the health and education issues that are the subject of community radio broadcasts.

# Community radio access does not directly reduce preferences for clientelist politicians

Greater access to community radio broadcasts could change household preferences for clientelist politicians by directly reducing household tastes for clientelist benefits; by changing other household characteristics – for example, by encouraging households to obtain more education – that could in turn influence attitudes towards clientelist political promises; or by increasing household demand for health and education. We cannot distinguish between the latter two mechanisms, because we know that radio in Benin indeed causes households to invest more in the health and education of their members (Keefer and Khemani, 2013, 2014). However, evidence presented in this section is inconsistent with the first mechanism, that community radio programming directly reduces citizen preferences for clientelist transfers.

We do this by exploiting another vignette (Vignette 3b in the Appendix), which was designed to elicit citizen preferences for a classic form of clientelism: gift-giving or vote-buying at the time of elections. Gift-giving in elections is highly salient in Benin. The 2005 Afrobarometer survey surveyed 1,200 respondents in Benin; 46 percent of them said that politicians always make gifts during campaigns; 84 percent said they often or always make gifts. In this vignette, both politicians promise general improvements in health and education services in the commune, not the concrete promises in the jobs vignettes, of providing malaria bed nets and textbooks to children throughout the commune. Only one makes gifts prior to the election. Hence, the gifts vignette imposes no trade-off between the clientelist inducement and health or education.

The absence of a necessary trade-off between gifts and services reflects what we know about respondents’ likely experience with election gift-giving. The financing of gift-giving by political 27