While the current scholarship on open defecation overwhelmingly focuses on increasing access to sanitation facilities as the solution, millions of people around the world still practise open defecation despite having latrines. This is especially problematic in urban slums where people are more vulnerable to sanitation-related diseases compared with rural areas because of their high population density. We explore why latrines are not being used even when they are available to slum dwellers by identifying social interactions that serve as information channels that promote public latrine use. Using an original survey in New Delhi, we find that slum dwellers who frequently interact with slum leaders, more so than other community leaders, are more likely to use nearby public latrines regularly. A survey of slum leaders finds that their role in fixing and maintaining public latrines and informing others of these acts as well as educating people on hygiene encourage public latrine use.
Do women respond in different ways to foreign policy events and elite messages compared to men? This article integrates the literature on gender and conflict with that on public opinion to examine how gender matters for the effect of elite messages and national security events on public opinion regarding a foreign adversary. We theorize that women’s opinions of an adversary are more likely than men’s to be influenced by national security events because of the higher value they attach to the costs of conflict. Our empirical analysis takes advantage of the natural setting of inter-Korea relations, which includes unpredictable, thus plausibly exogenous, real-world national security events instigated by North Korea and contrasting messages regarding North Korea by South Korea’s elites during this timeframe. Using annual survey data from a nationally representative sample of South Koreans about attitudes toward North Korea from 2003 to 2016, we find that foreign policy events of high consequence for national security have a greater negative impact on women’s opinions. This is the case even in the face of positive elite messages that contradict those events.
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