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24 September 2006

Fundamental Changes in Methodology Labor Market?

Last Fall I counted 51 faculty methods jobs posted in political science. I paid close attention because I was on a relevant search committee. This was particularly interesting because equilibrium in past years was about five or so. Right now there are 39 methods jobs posted (subtracting non-tenure/tenure track positions). Now some of these are listed as multiple fields, but one has to presume that listing the ad on the methods page is a signal.

Apparently we have US News and World Report to thank for fundamentally changing the labor market by making methodology the fifth "official" field of the discipline. A number of (non-methodologist) colleagues believed that I must be exaggerating since an order of magnitude difference seems ridiculous. Actually, it turns out that I was underestimating as Jan Box-Steffensmeier (president of the Society for Political Methodology and the APSA methods section) recently got a count of 61 from the APSA. I think their definition was a little broader than mine (perhaps including formal theory and research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions).

So an interesting question is how quickly does supply catch up to demand here? My theory is that it will occur rather slowly since the lead time for methods training seems to be longer than the lead time for other subfields. This is obviously good news for graduate students going on the market soon in this area. I'm curious about other opinions, but I think that this is a real change for the subfield.

Posted by Jeff Gill at September 24, 2006 10:05 AM