health and education services. If radio effects operated by reducing citizen taste for clientelist practices such as vote-buying, we should observe a negative correlation between radio access and preferences for gift-giving candidates. In fact, we found no indication that the community radio stations we focus on carry any systematic political programming to influence citizen views of clientelist practices such as vote-buying. Consistent with this, radio access does not reduce preferences for gift-giving candidates. We conclude that radio has a negative effect on preferences for clientelist benefits when these are clearly presented as coming at the expense of health and education, and no effect or an ambiguous effect when the trade-off is unclear.

Our data come from a March 2009 survey of over 4,000 households in 210 villages spread across the 32 communes of northern Benin. This part of Benin was identified in Wantchekon’s (2003) work as most amenable to clientelist campaign platforms that include promises of jobs, which garnered more votes than broader public interest platforms. Nevertheless, even in this relatively inhospitable terrain, citizen access to radio programming has a significant effect on citizen support for candidates who promise the expansion of public health and education services.

This paper contributes a novel empirical strategy to the identification of the causal effects of media on the preferences of households for clientelist politicians. Media effects are notoriously difficult to identify, since the location and programming of media outlets are typically influenced by the characteristics of the residents of the broadcast area. Community radio stations in Benin are, in principle, no different: specific commune characteristics could determine the commune in which they are located. However, the unique structure of radio markets in the northern region of the country gives rise to substantial intra-commune variation in radio access that is exogenous to village characteristics.

Twenty-one community radio stations serve this region, and all carry similar programming on the value of public health and education services, sponsored by government ministries and foreign donors. The stations are dispersed, rather than concentrated around specific markets or densely populated areas; each is small so that it can be community-owned and managed. Because the signals of these low-powered stations are easily disrupted, even villages located close to each other, and sharing the same economic, geographic, and topographical features, can differ significantly and exogenously in the number of community radio signals (and hence, the amount of programming content) reaching them both from within and outside the commune. We draw our village sample by exploiting this potential for exogenous variation in intra-commune radio access across similarly situated villages.

Our results have implications for the new thrust in international development to use information, transparency, and citizen engagement to promote good governance. They suggest that mass media can play a role in shifting political competition away from clientelist strategies and towards more broad-based public service delivery that is needed for development. Specifically, public interest media programming on the value of health and education can mitigate one type of problem that sustains clientelism: insufficient voter demand for public services relative to their demand for private benefits. It can therefore help to build a constituency for policy promises directed at improving health and education services.

At the same time, however, the media we examine here do not systematically reduce the appeal of vote buying at the time of elections. Furthermore, Keefer and Khemani (2012, 2013) show that access to media, in and of itself, even when that media encourages households to care about health and education, is insufficient to enable citizens to extract greater benefits from government. Together, these results show that the impact of media depends upon programming content and 4