# **5. Village-level variation in radio access and bed-nets distribution**

The analysis that follows examines two hypotheses. First, if radio access enhances government responsiveness, households with better access to community radio should be able to obtain more bed nets from government distribution programs, particularly free bed nets, than households without. Second, if radio access changes household behavior and increases household demand for and valuation of bed nets, then we should, in principle, see an effect on the prices paid and quantity of bed nets reported by households. However, in the institutional setting in Benin higher-level government officials decide the quantity of bed nets available in a village. We expect local-level media to have little effect on the decisions of these officials, and therefore little effect on the quantity of bed nets supplied locally.

Instead, if radio access increases household demand supply effects should be largely confined to pricing decisions, over which local officials have control. In particular, local officials should sell bed nets that they could otherwise distribute for free in areas with greater radio access. The second hypothesis, then, is that greater radio access will have a positive effect on the number of paid government bed nets that households report and no effect or a negative effect on the number of free government bed nets they report. Because higher level officials responsible for allocations are less responsive to local media, and because the private market in bed nets is small, greater radio access should have no effect on total bed nets in the household.

The Benin data lend themselves especially well to tests of the effects of media access on government accountability, the first hypothesis, since we not only know household access to media, we also know the content of media programming. Prior research has examined the reduced form effects of media access on government transfers, implicitly suggesting that these effects arise because media raises awareness of the transfer program: whether a program exists, eligibility for the program, how one gains access to program benefits, and when those benefits are available. Accountability also requires that citizens know the actors who are responsible for delivering the benefits. Our data allow us to confirm that all of this information is accessible in Benin and is broadcast on community radio stations.

This is significant, since important areas of public policy are often not covered by the media. Reports of natural or economic disasters are more intrinsically interesting and attract a wider audience than analyses of the efficacy of government education or malaria policy (Drèze and Sen, 1990; Eisensee and Strömberg, 2007; Khemani, 2007). This is not a constraint in northern Benin, however, since a significant share of the programming of the sample radio stations is dedicated to health and education programming. In addition, malaria policies stand in contrast to public policies with complicated production functions, such as education, in which the contribution of government to final outcomes is difficult to discern. Compared to education, media can more easily inform citizens about the contribution of government to bed net availability and the effect of bed nets on malaria.

While community radio programming in Benin transmits the information that prior research has suggested matters for accountability, two considerations that have emerged more recently in the literature may mitigate accountability effects. The first is the concern about framing discussed earlier (e.g., Prat and Strömberg 2011): even if the information is presented, it may not be framed in such a way as to promote an accountability effect. Second, and related citizens may confront other obstacles to holding politicians accountable (―political market imperfections‖, as in Keefer and Khemani 2005), that obstruct their efforts to demand better services or higher transfers even if they are well-informed about the policy.

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