institutional context, and suggest that the design of related transparency policies is likely to matter in whether it achieves its objectives.

The next section of the paper reviews the literature on citizen support for clientelism and the role of mass media. Section 3 describes the media market in Benin, and the nature of programming content that can plausibly account for our results. Section 4 discusses the empirical strategy to identify radio’s impact. Results are presented in Section 5. The discussion in Section 6 reports evidence supporting the mechanisms through which community radio operates: it does not reduce tastes for clientelist appeals; households with children that listen to community radio are also more likely to prefer non-clientelist candidates; and those same households are more likely to know salient education and health facts.

# **2. Citizen support for clientelism and the role of mass media**

A large body of research emphasizes that citizens of developing countries are particularly susceptible to clientelist forms of political mobilization (Stokes, 2005, 2007; Kitschelt and Wilkinson, 2007; Vicente and Wantchekon, 2008). Targeted transfers, from vote-buying to patronage jobs, have been modeled as having a larger effect on political support from poorer groups, for whom the marginal utility of an additional unit of consumption is higher (Dixit and Londregan, 1996).

However, income alone does not explain why the poor are more willing to give up public goods or broadly delivered public services, which also increase their welfare, in exchange for (the possibility) of receiving more private benefits. Several strands of research have theorized that the trade-off between targetable private benefits and broadly delivered public services arises in political strategies because of electoral and political institutions as politicians determine how to allocate resources to win office (Lizzeri and Persico, 2001; Keefer and Vlaicu, 2008; Robinson and Verdier, 2003). In developing country economic and institutional contexts, there is a higher trade-off because politicians are more easily able to win political support through targeted benefits (Stokes, 2007; Kitschelt and Wilkinson, 2007; Baland and Robinson, 2008). Khemani (2013) provides empirical evidence of this trade-off using uniquely suited data from the Philippines. In villages where votebuying is more widespread in elections, municipal governments deliver fewer public health services, and, health records show that a larger proportion of children are malnourished.

This paper focuses on one reason why the provision of targeted benefits would be more efficacious as a political strategy in developing countries: lower voter demand for public goods because they are ill-informed about the true value of public goods. For example, persuading poor households to take up government-provided anti-malaria bed nets is a substantial challenge in poor countries because these households are less likely to know that they reduce the risk of communicable disease (Cohen and Dupas, 2010; Dupas, 2009; Hoffman, 2009; Mahajan et al, 2009). Furthermore, the poor may be especially likely to value immediate monetary benefits more than health and education (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013). We build on this literature by examining, for the first time, whether greater access to mass media that carries programming designed to increase demand for health and education reduces citizen support for clientelism.

Through a unique field experiment conducted during the 2001 presidential elections in Benin, Wantchekon (2003) provides some of the most definitive evidence of citizen support for clientelist strategies. The experiment randomized citizen exposure to clientelist or programmatic policy platforms; those exposed to the clientelist platform were more likely to vote for clientelist candidates. This effect was strongest for candidates in northern Benin, the region where our study is 5