Political Science Departments: Reputations Versus Productivity

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Abstract
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.

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