The Government Response to Informed Citizens: New Evidence on Media Access and the Distribution of Public Health Benefits in Africa

We use a “natural experiment” in media markets in Benin to examine the impact of community radio on government responsiveness to citizens. Contrary to prior research on the impact of mass media, in this experiment government agents do not provide greater benefits to citizens whose exposure to community radio increased their demand for those benefits. Households with greater access to community radio were more likely to pay for government-provided bed nets to combat malaria than to receive them for free. Mass media changed the private behavior of citizens—they invested more of their own resources in the public health good of bed nets—but not citizens’ ability to extract greater benefits from government. While the welfare consequences of these results are ambiguous, the pattern of radio's effects that we uncover has implications for policy strategies to use mass media for development objectives.