The Internet And Public Policy In Comparative Perspective: Fill & Download for Free

I don’t think there’s a single conservative analogue to Vox. Most conservatives prefer to point and laugh at Vox’s mistakes rather than emulate them!Kidding aside, if you’re looking for sources that conservatives might read in hopes of piercing your bubble, consider checking out some of the following.PersonalitiesI never miss a chance to recommend Megan McArdle, now writing at The Washington Post (Megan McArdle). McArdle is a libertarian, economics-focused writer bringing a fascinating perspective to public policy questions.Glenn Reynolds, blogging under the Instapundit name, is a law professor and conservative focusing heavily on linking to others. He’ll write more extensively from time to time, but prefers flagging items for his readers. In that sense, he’s a great meta-source and will link conservative commentary from all over the Web.Ross Douthat, the in-house conservative at the New York Times (Ross Douthat), is also always worth reading.PublicationsNational Review and its website, National Review Online. (National Review) NRO is a cornerstone conservative publication and I greatly enjoy Charles C.W. Cooke, among many other authors there.Reason (Reason.com) is a libertarian-focused magazine, so again not quite conservative per se, but still a great place to read up on other perspectives, and they’ll often weigh in on issues related to civil rights and civil liberties. They also now host the Volokh Conspiracy (Volokh Conspiracy - Reason.com), a group-written legal blog that’s usually worth a look when the law is in the news.The Federalist (The Federalist - Culture, Politics, Religion) and the Washington Free Beacon (http://freebeacon.com/) may be a bit more comparable to Vox as publications that make no bones about presenting opinion journalism, but again, I don’t think they quite approximate Vox’s mission to “explain the news.”Keep in mind that conservatives usually see the same high-level news as anyone else, but have to turn to publications like these to see commentary from their perspective. So you’re less likely to find a conservative news publication so much as conservative commentary on the news that’s already out there.I’d encourage you to use these sources to find new ones as well. News sites on the Internet link each other incessantly; you’ll always find new articles and authors just be reading over any of these sites. Keep following those rabbit holes, and when you find someone whose writing you like, bookmark them (or even, confessing my age, add them to an RSS reader) and keep coming back.

I have written three mains with Public Administration as an optional. In 2014 I had got 164, 226 in 2015 and 312 in 2016. My relation with this optional is very special.It was because of public administration that I did not get an interview call in 2014 mains. I missed the cut off by 9 marks as i had got only 164 in total.However, it was the same Public Administration that ensured that I got a good rank in CSE 2016 as I had got 312 in total.Somewhere between 2014 and 2016, i realized that I lacked in the depth of knowledge in the subject and the way I presented the answers and consistently improved on both. In this write-up, I will cover the book list I used, strategies that helped me and some common tips.Public Administration as an optional :Pub AD was my choice since the very beginning. I found the subject interesting and enjoyed reading it. Reading public administration will also help one to get good scores in GS2 and GS4. In that way, as a working professional preparing simultaneously, I found Pub AD to be a very helpful subject as it had a good overlap with GS syllabus too. Over the past years, Pub AD has not performed well. Those who had written 2012 and 2014 will agree with me that the questions were quite intimidating.For eg : This question from 2012 mains :In the canonization of this abstract idea of ‘Staatsraison’ are inseparably woven the sure instincts of the bureaucracy for the conditions which preserve its own power in the State’ [Weber]. Explain.Or this very first compulsory question from 2014 mains :What are the implications of the post-structuralism perspective on the discrete aspects of Public Administrations, coming from its epistemological positions?In both the questions, when you are sitting in the exam hall and your mind is racing against time, your performance would obviously tend to come down as a significant amount of time would be spent on just decoding what the question means and what the examiner is expecting.However, as you keep reading the subject and gain knowledge, though you would not exactly know what the question demands, you can still attempt the question and write a related answer. So, knowledge base is very important and that is why though many would say one need not prepare the hidden syllabus of Public Administration, I would recommend one to cover the hidden syllabus too because even if there is no direct question, one can use that knowledge to enrich their answers.Book List and Sources :Radhabinod Aribam for both Paper 1 and Paper 2 - This is one gem of a book. Please read the book again and again (especially paper 1) until you are very thorough with the concepts. The book also contains the recent topics that are often asked by UPSC and hence is a good source of preparation.Public Administration by Laxmikant - Select topics from this like Administrative Practices in other countries are very helpful.Administrative Thinkers by Prasad & Prasad - A basic and a very good source of preparation for Thinkers. Please get the latest edition which contains additional thinkers like Dror and Drucker.Second ARC - Reading the report gives you a good rate of return as you can quote the report in both Pub AD papers and GS2 paper. Must read from my point of view.There are lots of topics that you may have to prepare from the internet. Topics like Good Governance, New Localism, Neo Liberalism, Social Audit, Citizen Charter, best practices, techniques of administrative improvement and comparative public administration etc can be obtained from the internet.I have not read from Mohit Bhattacharya as I found the language quite tough. If you are comfortable, you can read the same.Look out for successful administrative practices. I used to have a list like Bultoo radio, Trichy Community Policing model, Jan Maitra etc and keep updating that list from various sources like newspapers, PM’s award for Public Administration etc .IGNOU materials are good for some topics like New Right, Public Policy making, thinkers like Hayek, Nozick and Friedman etc.,PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION is a very good source for revision and a general study on Pub AD related topics.PRS India is a very good website. Be on the constant lookout for PRS Blog, Monthly Policy Review etc.Hidden Syllabus :Serious aspirants of Pub AD by this time would have been aware of Hidden Syllabus. It is always better to prepare the hidden syllabus too as some questions like Wildavsky and Warren Bennis appear from Hidden syllabus. There is no one defined source for hidden syllabus and you need to collect material from the internet and the free video lectures of Mahanty Sir in YouTube and Flavido.Some topics that needs to be covered in addition to regular syllabus are :Public Administration in other countries - the french and american version, Thatcherism and Reaganism and how New Zealand succesfully adopted concepts of ThatcherMinnowbrook 3 and latest advances in the field of Public AdministrationNew thinkers like Marx and his views on Bureaucracy, Hayek, Nozick, Firedman, Talcott parsons, a detailed view on Waldo, critics of Bureaucracy like Warren Bennis, Foucalt and Governmentality, Edward Weidner and his contribution to Development Administration, Gunnar Myrdal, Sabatiers Advocacy Coalition Framework, Lasswell and his idea on Policy Science, Estonian Black Box of Policy Making, Aaron Wildavsky and BudgetingGender and Administration, Gender in Administration and Gender and Budgeting etc.Ferrel heady and his contribution to Comparative Public AdministrationConcepts like Neo Classical Theorists, Neo Marxism, Post Structuralism, Post Modernism, Pareto Optimality, Critical Theory, Habermas, Contingency vs Strategic Contingency , Neo Taylorism and Gramsci’s criticism of Taylor, Taylorism and recent best practices like Toyota Production System, Kaizen, Gemba etc.,In Development dynamics, do read about Amartya Sen & Jean Dreaze vs Bhagwati Sen DebateTechniques of Administrative improvement - If you spend little time here, you can score very good marks in the related questions. Read about CPM, PERT and how to draw the charts, Gantt Chart, Enterprise Resource Management, SAP, Management Information System etcThese are some areas where preparation would help you stay confident while attempting questions and also would help you to enrich your answers. I’ll keep on adding topics as and when I remember.Some General Tips :Keep your answers simple and lucid, There is no need to use complicated or flowery language.Beating around the bush does not work with Public Administration. Stay to the point and do not digress.For paper 1, contemporary examples, especially from Indian Administration will surely boost your marks.For paper 2, try to link with paper 1 concepts and thinkers as far as possible.Liberally use and quote articles of constitution, sections of IPC and CrPC and recommendations of various committees. You will see that your marks improve.Use Flow charts and Diagrams wherever possible. They will help you to present your answer in a better way and you can save lots of time.Try to quote an example as far as possible for all answers.Divide your answer into intro - body - conclusion. Widen your reading base, quoting recent government examples is what will differentiate you from other candidates and would give you good marks.Have a good peer group and discuss about topics and questions regularly. Confluence of various ideas will do magic on your answer. I had an amazing peer group in Telegram where we used to discuss in depth about topics of Pub AD.Regularly practice answer writing. It is also good to join any test series so that some one would correct your presentation. I had joined a test series in Prabha IAS academy , Chennai and it had really helped me to hone my answer writing skills.I am posting some of the answers I wrote in the test series for your reference :Public Policy is Influenced by Various Organs / Bodies. Comment2.Finance is a major Problem for Urban Local Bodies. Comment.3. Public Policy cycle plays a vital role in Policy Making. Comment.4. Arthashastra is an all time treatise on Polity. Analyse5. The most significant developments in management theory emerged in the 20th century. We owe much of our understanding of managerial practices to Taylor’s concept of Scientific management. But it has no relevance today after 125 years of evolution. Do you agree?I have tried to cover all aspects of my Public Administration preparation with this. I will update the answer if anything else comes across my mind. Hope this article helps aspirants with Public Administration as an optional. Please feel free to comment if you have any doubts, would be more than glad to clarify. My best wishes for aspirants with Public Administration to come out with flying colors.

Absolutely. Yishan's comment was extremely inappropriate. It was cruel to the employee and reflected negatively on both Yishan and Reddit.It is reasonable for Yishan to defend his business. But he went far beyond that and showed little regard for this person as a human being.As CEO of a serious business, Yishan should be mature enough to weather inflammatory remarks and to make an appropriate, measured response. It would have been totally fine for Yishan to say something like:The reasons you are alleging had nothing to do with your termination. As you know, we encourage reasonable push back on policies. I am happy to give you more frank disclosure on your termination privately. If you insist, I will also provide this feedback publicly (as you've made this a public discussion)--but I would strongly discourage you from doing this until you've heard the feedback yourself.That would have adequately cleared Reddit's name.He also could have just ignored the comment. It was one comment in an AMA, not the focus of it. And few people will take the allegation that seriously.Additionally, as CEO of Reddit specifically, Yishan should have been especially aware of the Internet Hate Machine's power. How it can take one, relatively minor thing and lash out at an individual, losing all perspective on whether the reaction is proportional to the incident. Reddit (along with Twitter) is behind many of these things. Yishan should understand the dark side of his company enough to not start fires.Many people say that the guy was "asking for it." He behaved stupidly perhaps, but that is not the same thing as "asking for it." I am fairly confident that this was not what he expected. The whole idea of someone "asking for it" is a perspective that if someone does something stupid or wrong, then they no longer merit sympathy. That's a pretty heartless attitude to have.He's a person and he (maybe) screwed up. Maybe he did know why he was fired and he didn't want to admit it (understandable). Maybe he knew the real reasons but thought this also played a role. Maybe he was totally ignorant. Regardless, he didn't deserve this level of shaming.Even if he did "deserve" it, you should still ask: why do it? It wasn't necessary to protect Reddit's reputation. It served only to hurt this individual. It felt vengeful, cruel, and immature. The fact that it was done by a comparatively powerful CEO makes it even worse.So yes, Yishan should regret it. It was bad for Reddit, himself, and especially this employee.However - and I want to be clear about this - Yishan is a person too. People screw up, especially when emotions flare and they can find some sort of rational justification for an action.It was a mistake, and a big one, but that's part of being human. We also need to give Yishan a break and not assume this to be representative of him as a person, and not respond to this incident out of proportion with what he did.The Internet hate machine is a scary thing, and we should all work to stop it.