The use of radio access instruments for listening removes the bias introduced by household characteristics that influence both whether they listen to radio and their political preferences. Nevertheless we cannot make causal inferences about the effects on political preferences of listening to community radio. On the one hand, access to non-community radios is endogenous, but must be taken into account given its effects on listening patterns. On the other hand, village exposure to community radio is not excludable from the second stage regression, since it should also influence households indirectly, through social networks, and not only through its direct effects on household listening.

Table 7 reports the results of the estimation of equation (3). As before, since we are again concerned with the effects of radio broadcasts that are particularly salient to households with children, we focus on the interaction of listening and number of children. Two specifications are explored for each of the two vignettes, jobs versus health candidates and jobs versus education candidate. One includes only the radio controls and the number of children. The other includes all controls, as in the full specifications in Tables 4 and 5. In all four cases, households with children that report listening to community radio, instrumented with the interaction of number of community radios and number of children, are significantly less likely to support the jobs candidate.

The interaction of children and number of community radio stations has a positive and significant coefficient in the first stage regressions, consistent with the argument that community radio is more salient in households with children. In contrast, access to community radio has an insignificant effect in the first stage regression on whether households without children report listening to community radio. Correspondingly, Table 7 results summarizing the second stage results indicate that the component of listening associated with access to radio has no effect in households with no children.

# Access to community radio improves household knowledge of health and education issues

Additional evidence of radio’s direct impact on households comes from survey data that households in villages with greater access to community radio are also more knowledgeable about salient health and education issues. Community radio programming sponsored by donors and government ministries informs households about government efforts to provide households with health or education services and urges households to improve their health and education practices, advising on the proper responses to common diseases, particularly malaria, or on the oversight of their children’s educational progress.

The survey asked respondents to answer numerous questions regarding their knowledge of various health and education issues. Some of these dealt with national policies (what is the government’s target number of health centers per commune?); others with issues of immediate relevance to the household (what is the appropriate treatment for diarrhea in children?). The effects of radio access on responses to these knowledge questions offer some insight into the direct effects of radio access on households.

As with listening, these effects are not straightforward to extract. First, radio access should increase knowledge about information actually broadcast by the community radio stations, but an exhaustive account of the information broadcast by the community radio stations in Benin is unavailable. Second, households retain information that is most salient to them; accurate tests therefore require identifying which information is salient for which households. Third, households for which information is most salient – those which use health and education services the most – can increase their knowledge of health and education issues simply through their interaction with service providers. Failure to correctly match information actually broadcast by radio stations to 33