Location

Half of all job openings are in just nine states: California, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and Florida; though by census region the East North Central group of states in the Midwest (Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio) had the most listings as a group. New England had the highest proportion of openings in undergraduate institutions—talmost two thirds of all positions there are in B.A. programs. The East South Central states (Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama) had the highest percentage of their openings in Masters level institutions.

Academic Fields

The major fields for which jobs are listed remain remarkably stable, at least since the mid-1980s from when some comparable data are available.²

A little over a quarter of all jobs are posted with a primary field of American politics, a fifth each for comparative politics and international relations, under 10% each for theory, public administration, public policy, and public law, and 3% for methodology. Table 1 shows the percentage of jobs with a primary listing in each major field from the mid-1980s, to early 1990s, to the last several years. The only significant difference seems to be the larger percentage of positions listed in public administration in the 1980s than now.

Jobs are often listed with more than one field designated, usually as a cross-reference. For the jobs listed recently, it is possible to tally the percentage of all listings that reference a given field. For instance, while a fifth of all academic listings specify comparative politics as the primary field, over a third specify comparative as one of the desired areas. This may give a more accurate picture of opportunities available on the market for job seekers in particular areas. Public policy in particular emerges as a proportionally larger cognate preference than primary. Figure 2 shows the percentage of recent listings that refer specifically to each of the major field areas.

Almost half of all academic job openings are in Ph.D.-granting institutions, about a third in B.A. level institutions, and the rest mostly in M.A. level institutions, as shown in Table 2. This roughly mirrors the distribution of faculty in the APSA membership as a whole. APSA's job listings include almost no positions for community colleges and relatively few for non-academic jobs, an omission in the eJobs service that we intend to rectify. There is relatively little difference in the type of field specialization sought in different types of institutions, except for what might readily be expected—there are more methodology openings in the Ph.D.-granting institutions and substantially more public administration openings at the M.A. level schools, as shown in Table 2.

Job openings usually report a preference for a specialized focus in addition to broadly defined fields such as comparative, American, or theory. These preferences can be difficult to categorize. Many are very specific (“applied negotiation and bargaining analysis”), many simply replicate the broad field categories (“public law”), and many use widely different ways to describe a possible common thread (country names instead of region names, such as Paraguay versus Latin America; or names of specific techniques instead of general skills, such as case study analysis instead of qualitative methods).

Still, we can identify some themes that appear more than others. From a world region perspective, Asian and Latin American research interests were the most frequently listed. Out of a sample of listings,³

144 specified an interest in some aspect of Asian or Chinese politics, and 127 specified Latin America. Africa was cited 87 times, and the Europe and the Middle East were each cited 72 times.

Environmental issues were the most frequently named policy themes, though these are very difficult to categorize. Environmental policy was specified formally in 93 listings, criminal justice in 53, social welfare in 24, education in 23, health in 21, and so forth. This however does not include references to generic policy emphasis, such as urban politics and policy, so the overall policy emphasis in the openings is larger.

From a methodology perspective, 150 positions included a specific request for quantitative methods and 27 requested qualitative methods skills—many specifying both. Interestingly, all references to qualitative methods skills were for AY2004 and none in the prior year—indicating either this interest is newly emerging in hiring or that it has been in place but not articulated in the past. Only nine openings made reference to expertise with rational or public choice approaches.