P Ublicizing Malfeasance : W Hen the Media Structure Facilitates Electoral Accountability in M Exico ∗

Incumbent malfeasance is a major challenge in many developing democracies. Our model suggests that electoral accountability requires a media market structure incentivizing local media to report incumbent malfeasance. We test the model’s implications in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and greater access to broadcast media. We find that, in contrast to non-local media, each additional local media station increases voter sanctioning of incumbent party malfeasance by one percentage point. Local media’s pro-accountability effects are greatest when an outlet’s audience resides in their municipality, but are crowded out by non-local media.