A Global Ranking of Political Science Departments.pdf

A Global Ranking of Political Science Departments Simon Hix London School of Economics Rankings of academic institutions are key information tools for universities, funding agencies, students and faculty. The main method for ranking departments in political science, through peer evaluations, is subjective, biased towards established institutions, and costly in terms of time and money. The alternative method, based on supposedly ‘objective’ measures of outputs in scientific journals, has thus far only been applied narrowly in political science, using pub- lications in a small number of US-based journals. An alternative method is proposed in this paper – that of ranking departments based on the quantity and impact of their publications in the 63 main political science journals in a given five-year period. The result is a series of global and easily updatable rankings that compare well with results produced by applying a similar method in economics. Rankings of academic institutions are key information tools for universities, public and private funding agencies, students and faculty. For example, to investigate whether and why European universities lag behind their competi- tors in the US, the European Economics Association commissioned research into the ranking of economics departments on a global scale (see, especially, Coupé, 2003). A variety of different ranking methods have been used in the natural sciences and have started to emerge in the social sciences, especially in economics (see, for example, Scott and Mitias, 1996; Dusansky and Vernon, 1998). All methods have disadvantages and trade-offs. Nevertheless, the best methods tend to have three elements: (1) they rank institutions on a global scale rather than in a single country; (2) they use ‘objective’ measures of research outputs, such as publications in journals, rather than subjective peer evaluations; and (3) they are cheap to update, for example by allowing for mechanized annual updates. However, no such