Political attitude estimation through Facebook like: a South Korean case study

Recently numerous studies are conducted to estimate the human personality from the online social activities. This paper develops a comprehensive model for political attitude estimation leveraging the Facebook Like information of the users. We designed a Facebook Crawler that efficiently collects data overcoming the difficulties in crawling Ajax enabled Facebook pages. We show that the category level selection can reduce the data analysis complexity utilizing the sparsity of the huge like-attitude matrix. In the Korean Facebook users’ context, only 28 criteria (3% of the total) can estimate the political polarity of the user with high accuracy (AUC of 0.82).     

Challenging the discourse on fragile states

The paper reviews the current discourse on state fragility and examines the definitional basis for this label. It puts forward a model for defining state fragility that is based on the state's capacity, which is its capability to protect itself, deliver services and manage economic risks and the state's resilience, which has to do with the management of social relations and political risks. This model also takes into account both middle-income and low-income countries. The nature and extent of state fragility here is a function of the relationship between state capacity and resilience. The relationship between state fragility and development and security outcomes is addressed with reference to the impact of initial conditions. The paper concludes by examining the resulting aid allocation on the basis of the existing state fragility discourse and puts forward an alternative aid allocation structure based on the proposed model for state fragility, and finds significant differences to the existing arrangement.     

Counting the development costs of the conflict in North-Eastern Nigeria: the economic impact of the Boko Haram-led insurgency

Nigeria presents an important case for examining the interaction between economic emergence and (in)security on account of the Boko Haram-led insurgency. This paper interrogates long-standing theoretical assumptions about the economic consequences of violent conflict in such a complex space. It analyses the cost of North-East Nigeria’s conflict on development by considering its impact on the economy at the national and subnational levels. Generalised assumptions about the ways through which conflict affects development appear to hold in some regards but not in others. Evidence suggests some disruption in fiscal adjustments at the macro level, trade and investment as well as agricultural production and commerce within the North-East but less so with regard to economic growth and foreign direct investment flows at the national level. The paper finds evidence of a dichotomy in terms of the impact of the conflict on the national and subnational economy. There is a high degree of containment of the repercussions of the conflict at the subnational level. However, there remains a degree of interconnectedness across these strata that are influenced by both domestic and international political economy dynamics.