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).     

‘Big D’ and ‘little d’: two types of twenty-first century development?

Confusion between the idea of development as purposeful intervention and development as outcome has been addressed by efforts to distinguish ‘intentional’ from ‘immanent’ development, and the distinction between ‘big D’ development as Western post- World War Two modernisation in the Global South, and ‘little d’ as the creation of winners and losers within unfolding capitalist change. As a heuristic device this distinction has been put to a variety of uses within development studies, but it has rarely been subjected to further scrutiny. This paper asks (1) whether the distinction remains coherent or risks being stretched too far, and (2) whether it remains relevant within the changing landscape of twenty-first century development. It first traces the historical evolution of the distinction, and then presents an exploratory case study of Bangladesh’s garment sector in order to analyse the relationship between the two kinds of development empirically, identifying a number of contradictions and ambiguities. It finds that while the ‘D/d’ distinction remains useful at a general level, further conceptualisation is now needed, and its relevance may fade as the significance of Western aid declines.     

Towards a More Comprehensive Analysis of Warlord Politics: Constitutive Agency,Patron–Client Networks and Robust Action

This article serves as a critique of a recent American foreign policy formulation proposing to eradicate ‘warlordism’ and asserting that democratic institutions can be directly created out of the post-eradication anarchic chaos. Against this background, recent years have indeed seen a bourgeoning literature on ‘warlord politics’ in Southeast Asia. The majority commonly portray political actors as faithful followers of economic rationality and self-interest. Therefore, most are conceived as selfish predators who ruthlessly use violence for private gains at the expense of public interest. By suggesting that comparative studies on warlordism have been heavily influenced by the political economy perspective, the article develops a more comprehensive analysis of warlord politics. Along the lines of patron–client network analysis, insights from moral economy and agency-structure sociological dualism are considered. Contrasting case studies are used to illustrate how the alleged warlords of Southeast Asia do not fit entirely into the political economy perspective. Caught in a vast patron–client network of competing interests and diverse powers across state and society, one's agency is constantly constituted by discursive arrays of contending interests, juxtaposing rationalities and multiple intentions. In state building, this complication is regarded as paradoxically necessary for compelling the alleged warlord-actor to re-define and elevate multiple private interests into public interest.