was remoteness; they did not anticipate that these stations would later rely on donor-funded health and education programming to sustain themselves.

Because donors preferred many, small, dispersed and remote community radio stations, substantial village-level variation in radio access emerged that is driven purely by accidental features – short distances and small changes in elevation – that are enough to degrade station signals. Consequently, villages that are close to each other and not separated by any remarkable topographical features can nevertheless exhibit significant differences in access. These differences are unlikely to affect political attitudes except through their influence on radio access.

We construct our village sample to reinforce the exogenous variation in radio access, by choosing villages that are closely matched in location and access to infrastructure, but still exhibit post-sampling variation in radio access. The 210 villages in the study were selected from maps showing the location of all villages relative to radio towers and major road networks. Selected villages were equidistant from towers and roads, as well as from commune boundaries, all of which are factors that could yield spurious correlations between radio access and political attitudes.<sup>14</sup> As a consequence, it is not the case that variation is driven by the clustering of some villages in a commune near a neighboring commune with a large number of community radio stations; nor that variation is driven by clustering of some villages around community radios located within the commune.

Several further observations support the argument that variation in village radio access is exogenous. First, access to community radio is uncorrelated with access to other types of radio. The ability of villages to receive signals from other types of radio is a potential summary statistic of a variety of village socio-economic conditions that could also drive a spurious correlation between community radio and political attitudes. However, the number of community radio signals available to a village is uncorrelated with the number of signals received from private commercial, public and religious radio. Second, historical accounts indicate that donors preferred to place community radios in more remote areas, contrary to the usual practice of radio entrepreneurs. Third, we can show that the effects of radio access on political attitudes are driven by community radio rather than access to any other type of radio that may vary with other village characteristics.

Finally, fourth, observable village characteristics and the number of community radio stations to which villages have access are largely uncorrelated, controlling for commune fixed effects. This suggests that unobserved characteristics are also likely to be uncorrelated with the number of stations. Table 3 presents these results.

The first two columns of Table 3 report regressions of the number of community radio stations to which a village has access on all observable village and household characteristics that we use in this analysis. The first column is a multivariate regression that measures the partial correlation of each characteristic, holding the others constant. The second column reports the results of a bivariate regression of each of the characteristics on the number of community radio stations. All regressions control for commune fixed effects and _p_ -values are calculated based on village-clustered standard errors. The last column of Table 3 reports the mean of all observable village and

> 14 Lacking data on the precise GPS locations of stations and villages, we relied on pictorial maps provided by our local consultants to identify neighboring villages that were located equally distant from radio towers. As we discuss below, we are able to verify post-survey that our sampled villages exhibit no correlation between radio access and observable characteristics of location that could independently impact political attitudes.

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