Determinants of Political Science Faculty Salaries at the University of California

Abstract

Combining salary data for permanent non-emeritus faculty at seven departments of political science within the University of California system with lifetime citation counts and other individual-level data from the Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld (2007a) study of faculty at Ph.D.-granting political science departments in the United States, I analyze determinants of faculty salaries. For the full data set the main finding are that (1) base salaries of UC political science faculty are slightly more strongly correlated to citation rates (annualized or total lifetime citations) as a measure of research visibility than they are to seniority measured by years since receipt of the Ph.D.; and (2) that gender differences and subfield differences in salary essentially vanish once I take into account both year of Ph.D. and research visibility (as measured by annualized citation counts), while gender inequities would appear to exist if I did not control for both variables.