Response to “Ranking Political Science Journals”

Micheal Giles and James Garand have done us a great service by revealing many of the complexities involved in using either citational or reputational approaches to ranking journals in political science (October 2007).

I am disturbed, however, that two very important journals in the field are completely left out of their ranking of 90 journals. These are ones I am familiar with as publisher, so I naturally have a special interest in seeing that they are not overlooked.

Giles and Garand do explain that the Journal of Policy History is one of 21 journals not included in this ranking because, although counted in their earlier reputational survey, it was omitted in their new analysis because ISI does not collect citation data for it. That is a shame because JPH is widely regarded as one of the two best journals in its subfield, the other being Studies in American Political Development.

The other is not mentioned at all, and its omission is troubling because overall political theory seems to get short shrift in the ranking, with the principal journal in this subfield, political theory, only entered at #61. That is Philosophy and Public Affairs, founded with my assistance at Princeton University Press in 1971 and now published by Blackwell. It represents the strain of Anglo-American philosophy in political theory stemming from the work of John Rawls; indeed, Rawls was advisory editor to the journal when it began. Its editorial board included such distinguished political scientists as Dennis Thompson and Michael Walzer, and two of the five articles in its first issue were by political scientists, Walzer and Shlomo Avineri. It was later co-edited by Joshua Cohen, and its current editor is Charles Beitz.

That it does not appear among the 90 journals in this new citational analysis is perhaps to be explained by the same reason as the exclusion of JPH; no doubt it, too, is not covered by ISI surveys.

Its absence from the author's earlier (2003) study, however, is more puzzling. This is surely a more prestigious journal than many of those listed, so one can only wonder who was consulted about journals' “reputation.”

These two journals' omission, together with the authors' observations about other flaws in both citational and reputational approaches, should make everyone wary of relying too heavily on any such measures in assessing quality of published research.

Sandy Thatcher, Director, Penn State Press

Sanford G. Thatcher, Director, Penn State University Press

In Response to Hayward R. Alker's In Memoriam Tribute

I read with great sadness the obituary of Hayward R. Alker, Jr. (January 2008). In my prior career as a political scientist he was one of the most influential faculty I had the fortune to study with. As eloquently captured in the testimonials already printed in PS, he also was one of the most amazing human beings I ever met. I am writing now simply to offer an alternative narrative of his research, one I did not see in the PS obituary.

Hayward was a champion of the dramaturgical conception of human action. In operation, that meant he understood human beings as needing to seek out roles to play in society that would generate behavioral choices for them as they encountered new, unforeseen circumstances. These roles thus were like the linguistic grammars that allows humans to generate novel sentences as we seek to communicate with others in new situations. Hayward collected and analyzed a huge range of scholarly attempts to understand the logic of this human dramaturgical grammar. His fierce adherence to dramaturgical theory fueled his equally fierce critiques of standard behavioral social science. A regression equation may summarize something, but it is not a substitute for the grammars of political action as Hayward strove to understand them.

Ultimately, though, Hayward was dedicated to something foreign to most social science: social change. His purpose for studying dramaturical conceptions of human action was to open the way for humans to recognize that often the scripts prepared for them were not inevitable. When it came to his work on political conflict and war, that meant developing social theory to show nations and their leaders that conflict could be prevented.

Co-existence and peace were possible if we could read from a different script.

I want to recognize two achievements in Hayward's life that I cherish. One was the publication of his article, “The Dialectical Logic of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue” in the APSR. I think in many ways that was a highpoint in his quest to expose social science to the dramaturgical perspective on political action. It is worth reading again—please do. Second, I always get a smile about his work on modeling the Jesus story as a virus (metaphorically seeking its actual DNA to explain its successful replication). Needless to say, that didn't go over well with some Christians, but Hayward had the chutzpah to accept speaking engagements with Christian audiences to explain the work! I heard that he often won them over.

Some of his closer friends, recognizing his deep interest in language, had a term of endearment for him. I'm not sure I was in that group, but I'll use it here. Farewell, Word.

Erik Devereux, Executive Director, Association for Public Policy, Analysis and Management