Socio-political tensions in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) development in low-income Asian cities

International development agencies, with the help of the central government, support building state of art Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in low-income Asian cities. However, BRT investment over indigenous modes of mobility is creating socio-political tensions at the local level. This article uses multi-level governance as a theoretical lens to examine the relationships among actors in BRT investment decisions in Bandung and Surabaya, Indonesia. The research finds that local stakeholders can distort national and supranational policy initiatives totally or in a way that while projects are delivered, they are of limited use to the local communities they intended to help.     

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).     

Policy capacity during COVID-19 in Asia: A systematic literature review

COVID-19 has revealed the policy capacity of some governance institutions, both resilience and vulnerability. Hence, this circumstance has demanded public administration scholars and practitioners to rethink the existing governance practices, particularly in making effective crisis-related policies. This paper reviewed primary and secondary studies exploring the application of policy capacity competencies in facilitating COVID-19 handling in Asia. In achieving so, we did a systematic literature review of relevant studies published between January and October 2020. Applying the agreed search term to several databases, we found 2541 studies, while merely 30 were included for review. Findings from the studies are predominantly closely linked to operational capacity (n = 21). Other studies are related to political and analytical capacity (n = 14 and 7, retrospectively). We found that there are some dilemmas and inadequacy of understanding concerning the role of features in certain capacities (such as technology use versus individual privacy, the paradox of trust and legitimacy, or centralisation versus decentralisation), particularly in the time of crisis, which is a calling for future research.