why is european political science so unproductive and what should be done about it: a symposium
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Abstract The worldwide departmental ranking by Simon Hix and national performance evaluations have dramatically shown that European political science is not sufficiently competitive at the global level. This symposium analyses why this is the case and what kind of reform measures should be introduced to move beyond this dire state of affairs. The authors detail the problems in four domains – (i) funding of teaching and research; (ii) the ‘market’ for political science education; (iii) career development, salaries, and tenure decision-making; and (iv) the publication behaviour of European political scientists. Each contribution concludes with suggestions about how the situation could be improved.
Keywords
scientific productivity; departmental rankings; specialisation
S
everal evaluations, most notably Hix (2004a, b), have recently demonstrated that the scholarly productivity of European political science is well below the output of US-based scholars. To offer a dramatic illustration of this gap, the evaluation by Plu ¨mper (2003) can serve as an example. His analysis of publications indexed in ISI Web of Knowledge has shown that in the period between 1990 and 2002 authors from Harvard University produced more arti-
156
cles in political science journals than authors from any German department and from departments in most other European countries (Plu ¨mper, 2003: 535). Eighty-five European departments as compared to ninety-seven US ones appear among the top 200 political science departments in the world ranking by Hix (2004a: 304f). As is to be expected, the European states fare differently on this list. While the United Kingdom possesses forty-eight top-200
european political science: 6 2007 (156 – 159) & 2007 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/07 $30 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
departments, Germany has ten and France two. Italy and Spain both appear once in the ranking, whereas Poland does not make it onto the list. Among the middle-sized and smaller European states, the Netherlands (five), Norway (three), Sweden (three) and Switzerland (three) have more than two relatively productive departments. Hungary is the only postcommunist country that appears in the list of the 200 leading departments. Admittedly, the situation looks less dramatic if we compare America and Europe in terms of overall productivity. North America accounts for slightly above 50 per cent of the output, whereas Europe as a whole accounts for more than 40 per cent. Yet, this does not compensate for the almost complete lack of European (or at least Continental European) representation at the top of the lists. The different department rankings have led to an intensive discussion – not the least in this journal – about how productivity should be evaluated. However, the discipline has not yet devoted much time to careful analysis of the factors that have caused this continental divide in publication success. As many claim that political science is a field pioneered by US scholars, such a discrepancy might seem natural.
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