Mass Media and Political Accountability∗

Mass media can play a key role in enabling citizens to monitor the actions of incumbents and to use this information in their voting decisions. This can lead to government which is more accountable and responsive to its citizens’ needs. In spite of the intuitive plausibility of the proposition, there is comparatively little work in the political economy literature that scrutinizes the role and effectiveness of the media in fulfilling this function. A literature, however, is emerging which focuses attention on the importance of the socalled fourth estate of government in the policy process. A key feature of the approach taken here is to focus on incentives the media have to produce and disseminate information. This chapter discusses work on political agency problems with a focus on recent work by the authors. Besley and Burgess (2001), (2002) looks at the effect of media on responsiveness to shocks in India while Besley and Prat (2001) focuses on the determinants and consequences of captured media, with empirical evidence from cross-country data. At the heart of these ∗This is a draft chapter for The Right to Know: Institutions and the Media edited by Roumeen Islam, to be published by the World Bank.