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Political Science Departments: Reputations Versus Productivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2022

John S. Robey
John S. Robey*
Affiliation:
New Mexico State University
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Extract

This brief essay is written in an attempt to provide a comparison of the reputed quality of political science departments with measures of their productivity. The first study done in the last two decades which purported to assess the “quality” of political science departments was published in 1959 by Hayward Keniston. Keniston's study relied on a survey of the chairpersons of 25 departments and was greatly improved upon by Professors Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus who attempted to measure the strength of political science doctoral programs by drawing a random sample of more than 400 political scientists who were members of the American Political Science Association. In 1966 Professor Allan M. Cartter published the results of his survey of 35 chairpersons, 66 “senior scholars” and 64 “junior scholars” and obtained virtually identical results as the Somit-Tanenhaus study. The results of these studies may be seen in Table 1.

These studies are all valuable additions to the literature; however, the concepts of reputed “quality” or “strength” may suffer from many of the same drawbacks as the concept of reputed “power.”

That is, a department may have a reputation of excellence and yet publish very little. Converse.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Spring 1979 , pp. 202 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1979

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Footnotes

*

I would like to express my appreciation to my wife Terry, who helped me to gather the data for this essay, and to Professor Thomas R. Dye who encouraged me to pursue this project.

References

1 Keniston, Hayward, Graduate Study and Research in the Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1959), p. 142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Somit, Albert and Tanenhaus, Joseph, American Political Science: A Profile of a Discipline (New York, 1964), p. 34.Google Scholar

3 Cartter, Allan M., An Assessment of Quality Graduate Education (Washington, D.C., 1966), p. 100.Google Scholar

4 M.I.T. was not included in the 1957 or 1963 studies.

5 Somit and Tanenhaus, op. cit., p. 104.

6 It should be noted that we are comparing 1963 reputations with 1968–1977 productivity and thus there is not perfect point-in-time congruence between the two observations.

7 Morgan, David R. and Fitzgerald, Michael R., “Recognition and Productivity among Political Science Departments,” Western Political Quarterly 30 (September, 1977), pp. 342–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar