The political setting in Benin exhibits characteristics which would weaken the capacity of citizens to act collectively to sanction non-performing incumbents. Credible political commitments are, in developed democracies, mediated by programmatic political parties. In Benin, these parties are absent. The number of parties has fluctuated between 129 and 27 since competitive elections were first held in 1991. Over 100 tried to compete in the 2007 elections (Economist Intelligence Unit). None of the four major parties emerging from the 2007 elections had a programmatic identity – a basis for making credible commitments to large groups of citizens. Party fractionalization is correspondingly high: in 2006 the probability that two randomly selected legislators do not belong to the same party was 80 percent in Benin, compared to 52 percent in Ghana (Beck, et al. 2001). Even those households with access to mass media should therefore find it difficult to participate in collective action to demand access to free bed nets. Instead, in line with Keefer and Vlaicu (2008), their access to free bed nets is more likely to be a function of their membership in the right clientelist networks.

Even if political market imperfections, other than incomplete information, limit the effects of media access on government accountability, media access could nonetheless increase household demand for bed nets. If radio stations broadcast pertinent information and households listen to the broadcasts of that information, household demand for bed nets should increase. However, given prevailing market institutions in Benin for the supply of bed nets, the most likely response to increased household demand, in the absence of higher level government responsiveness, comes from the pricing decisions of local officials. Specifically, recalling the considerable discretion in local officials‘ pricing decisions but not in quantity supplied, local officials should respond to increased demand for bed nets by reducing household access to free nets and requiring them to pay a price in areas with high radio access, the second hypothesis.

These hypotheses are tested with regressions specified according to (1):

- (1) ,

where the dependent variable is, in turn, the total number bed nets (from all sources), the number of free, government-provided bed nets, and the number of paid government bed nets. The units of observation are household _i_ in village _j_ and commune _k_ ; is a commune fixed effect. If access to media increases government responsiveness and household demand for bed nets, for all three bed net variables. If the second hypothesis is correct, and higher demand for bed nets only leads local officials to sell bed nets that could otherwise distribute for free, for paid government bed nets, but is equal to or less than zero for free government bed nets; it is not significantly different from zero for total bed nets, given the small private market for bed nets.

In addition to commune fixed effects, the control variables include the number of children in the household and the number of children five years of age or younger, and the number of adults and the number of adults over 60. Malaria poses the greatest dangers for young children and pregnant women, and anti-malaria campaigns tend to encourage households to protect these populations. The 2007 bed net campaign in Benin specifically targeted young children, five and under. The results below provide no evidence, however, of successful targeting of this group.

The number of bed nets owned by a household, both through government donations and own-purchase, is significantly correlated with the total number of household residents, adults and children, but not, controlling for the total numbers of children and adults, with the number of children reported as younger than five. This could be because our sample size of households with more members of these demographic groups is not sufficiently large to detect such targeting, or because of measurement error in members‘ ages, especially around the cut-off of 5 years. The 18