Vol. 38, No. 18

2-18-2004
By: Jeff Grabmeier

Political Science ranked 4th best department in world

The Department of Political Science ranks as 4th best in the world, according to a new study done at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Ohio State ranked behind only Columbia, Harvard and Stanford universities among the world’s top political science departments.
The rankings were based on the number and impact of journal articles published by each university’s political science faculty.

“The study is a recognition of the great things our faculty have accomplished,” said Paul Beck, professor and chair of political science.
“Our faculty have been very active in publishing in the best journals, those that are the most respected by scholars in the U.S. and abroad, and that is reflected in the results of this study,” Beck said.

The study was conducted by Simon Hix, a faculty member at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Hix examined how many articles were published by faculty members at each university’s political science department between 1993 and 2002. He counted publications in 63 major political science journals from around the world.

He also weighted the rankings to take into account the number of faculty members in each university’s department and the relative impact or prestige of the journals in which they published.

Beck, who received the university’s Distinguished Scholar Award this year, said one advantage of this study was that it was based on relatively objective measures. Other surveys, such as the U.S. News & World Report rankings, are based on the subjective reputational scores given by political scientists. In the latest U.S. News rankings, published in 2001, Ohio State’s political science department was ranked 15th in the nation.

Ohio State may have done better in this study than in the U.S. News survey partly because of the more objective measures, and also because Ohio State faculty publish in the top European, as well as American, journals, Beck said. Hix’s study included several important European journals in his analysis.
Beck said that although it is hard to measure the quality of a department with any one rating, this study gives an indication of the strength of the political science faculty at Ohio State.

“This is a department that has changed a lot over the past decade or so,” he said.
“In that period, we’ve maintained or improved our quality even as well-known faculty have retired or moved on to other places. In fact, two-thirds of our faculty have come to the department in the last 12 years. We’ve hired new faculty who are every bit as good as the people we lost, and in some cases better, and this is reflected in the steady increases in our rankings by the Hix measures from the early 1990s to the present.”

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