Publicizing Malfeasance: When Media Facilitates Electoral Accountability in Mexico

Incumbent malfeasance is a major challenge in many developing democracies. However, voters often do not punish malfeasant politicians. We develop a simple model showing that electoral accountability requires that the local media market structure incentivize media stations to report incumbent malfeasance to voters. The model’s predictions are tested in Mexico, where we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in both the timing of audits revealing misallocated municipal spending and greater access to broadcast media to identify the effect of local media publicizing incumbent malfeasance revelations. We find that each additional local media station increases voter sanctioning of incumbent party malfeasance by one percentage point. In contrast, non-local media do not support sanctioning. Consistent with our model, local media’s impact is greatest when the audience resides in the station’s municipality, but can be crowded out by non-local media. These findings suggest that the media market structure can explain substantial variation in electoral accountability.