Kieran Healy and Steve Vaisey, dissatisfied with the NRC rankings of sociology departments, set up their own system for pairwise ranking of political science departments. The idea is straightforward – people clicking on the webpage they have set up are given two randomly chosen sociology departments and asked to say which is better. These pairwise comparisons can be used to construct an overall universe of reputational rankings. So far, they have gotten 65,000 votes on their ranking page. Kieran and Steve have now set up a similar ranking system for political science programs. You are all hereby encouraged to go to the site, click vigorously and provide reputational data.
UPDATE - From communication with Kieran, it appears that the initial seed population was taken from the top 100 philosophy departments. It is, however, possible to suggest new universities using the ‘make your voice heard: add your own idea’ button. So people who wish to include universities that were not on the initial list should do so, and do so promptly.
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So this sets up a system where the hordes of unpleasant grad students that infest the Job Rumours site, and who have a nearly infinite supply of time, can anonymously vote on the quality of each others’ programs ad infinitum. Or write scripts that do it for them.
What could possibly go wrong?
The system is harder to game than you might think, though it’s true that having a nearly infinite supply of time might help.
And also as regards time, someone just suggested “This test is too long”, which is true because if you let it, it will last forever. The point is to vote as many times as you like.
How is this any different from any other reputational ranking, including US News and NRC R? It’s going to have rough face validity, by definition, and correlate highly with # of PhDs. Cheaper, maybe.
It’s probably hard for an individual to game, but the collective will be able to game an insincere preference that amuses them. The PSJR swarms will probably crush Rochester, for example.
anonymous 2 has it half right – yes, this looks very close to the US News ranking, but no, Rochester isn’t getting crushed.
The one thing that seems off to me as of now is that then non-UK European top departments – most notably EUI Florence and ETH Zurich fare so poorly – in terms of both their faculty publication records and where they place their PhDs they should be about top 20.
Grad students with “a nearly infinite supply of time.”
That’s funny . . .
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