Strata and Stability: Reputations of American Political Scientists

Abstract

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The aptness of Orwell's observation is not confined to the community of Animal Farm, but extends to the “community of scholars” which constitutes the “learned discipline” of political science as well. In fact, as conceptualized by Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus in their seminal study of American Political Science, a “gallery of great men” is one of the characteristics of such a discipline, serving (inter alia) “… both as a sign of professional kinship and as a means of cementing these bonds.”As an organized human activity, political science possesses a number of formal and informal stratification systems. The former reflect the decentralized nature of the discipline and include the various departmental structures as well as the hierarchies of the specialized and regional associations and of APSA. The informal stratification systems—essentially the considered assessment of the significance of individual contributions to the discipline—are substantially more subjective. These diverge along idiosyncratic as well as along the institutional, geographic, and subfield dimensions of the formal stratification systems. Moreover, the formal and informal systems will depart to some extent, since they are based upon different and sometimes contradictory criteria. Frequently, a particularly prominent contributor to the discipline will be elevated to the Association's presidency in recognition of these activities. In other cases, however, the nature of the contribution precludes such formal acknowledgment.