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UC Irvine is definitely on the rise. South Carolina is pretty strong in IR but may be trending "even". And I have absolutely no clue on Kansas. Unfortunately history shows that the top 25 stays pretty stagnant, with the exeption of schools who improve their methods sequence and get a bump. I don't expect to see much change when the new rankings come out (whenever that is).

As the future prospective inheritants of the discipline, making substantial changes in regard to the incestuous nature of the discipline's top programs is largely up to us.

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UC Irvine is definitely on the rise. South Carolina is pretty strong in IR but may be trending "even". And I have absolutely no clue on Kansas. Unfortunately history shows that the top 25 stays pretty stagnant, with the exeption of schools who improve their methods sequence and get a bump. I don't expect to see much change when the new rankings come out (whenever that is).

As the future prospective inheritants of the discipline, making substantial changes in regard to the incestuous nature of the discipline's top programs is largely up to us.

Not trying to start another rankings discussion or be disrespectful but I'm not so sure - every school in the "top 40" has been ranked by one survey or another in the "top 20" at some point - and no survey exists that anyone likes. I'd say there's a good deal of turbulence among the 40 schools in the top 20....

Edited by Jwnich1
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Is it new data?

And clearly, everybody knows that the only rankings that matter are the short-lived President's Day rankings (aka The Ranking that Won't Matter or A Poor Attempt to Rank Political Science PhD Programs). That one day was a golden one for the discipline.

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Is it new data?

And clearly, everybody knows that the only rankings that matter are the short-lived President's Day rankings (aka The Ranking that Won't Matter or A Poor Attempt to Rank Political Science PhD Programs). That one day was a golden one for the discipline.

That might have been the best one yet!

The real question is: what are we ranking? Is it placement? faculty output? prestige? an amalgam? does this even make sense?

This is like asking which car is "best"? You'll get different answers from the 20 yr old environmentalist driving a used Prius who volunteers with Green Peace, and the 60 yr old financial exec driving a Porsche....

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I was under the impression PoliSci isn't being ranked this year.

http://www.usnews.co...launch-march-13

For some reason I think Social Sciences, including Political Science, are newly ranked every four years. If memory serves the current rankings were determined in 2009 and the rankings before that were done in 2005. Nevertheless, I could be very wrong, it would not be the first time.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Does anyone have any advice on up and coming schools geared towards Political Economy and Comparative?

I have my bets that UMich will move even further up in the next USNews rankings. Of course, they don't rank PE, but if they did Mich would be a top program. I know that UMich isn't in the range that would be considered "up and coming," but Mich in both PE and Comp definitely holds its weight against the #1 ranked schools; it just doesn't get much love on these boards because it's not Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton. In the lower "up and coming" range, it gets harder to locate schools that are good in both fields, since a lot of programs further down tend to specialize in one area or another.

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I have my bets that UMich will move even further up in the next USNews rankings. Of course, they don't rank PE, but if they did Mich would be a top program. I know that UMich isn't in the range that would be considered "up and coming," but Mich in both PE and Comp definitely holds its weight against the #1 ranked schools; it just doesn't get much love on these boards because it's not Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton. In the lower "up and coming" range, it gets harder to locate schools that are good in both fields, since a lot of programs further down tend to specialize in one area or another.

umich would be my first choice actually, however, it is a very competitive prgram to get into.

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I have my bets that UMich will move even further up in the next USNews rankings. Of course, they don't rank PE, but if they did Mich would be a top program. I know that UMich isn't in the range that would be considered "up and coming," but Mich in both PE and Comp definitely holds its weight against the #1 ranked schools; it just doesn't get much love on these boards because it's not Stanford, Harvard, or Princeton. In the lower "up and coming" range, it gets harder to locate schools that are good in both fields, since a lot of programs further down tend to specialize in one area or another.

Yeah, political economy's always a bit of an odd area, given that a lot of the best people do work across several subfields (American, IR, comparative). Michigan seems to have a lot of people doing great work at the intersection of comparative and something else, e.g. comparative and IR, comparative and American. Most of the people also have strong methods interests. However, I don't know whether there's much that would lead to an increase in ranking since 2009. Amongst people I know, Koremenos and Tsebelis are fairly new, but they still both came in around 2007. Most of the heavy hitters I know there have been there for a little while. Brian Min is new and great, but very junior. The only reason I could see them going up is if there's a 2-3 year lag between changes in a department and increases in ranking (which I suppose is a reasonable possibility for reputation rankings).

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I'm surprised no one has mentioned USC yet. They have tons of money and a willingness to spend it. Some of their hires so far have been misses, but they're clearly on the way up.

I was looking at USC, from what I can see they seem to be mostly focused on American. Is this what others have found also?

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I was looking at USC, from what I can see they seem to be mostly focused on American. Is this what others have found also?

Are we talking Southern California or South Carolina. B/c SoCal only offers a Ph.D. in "Politics and International Relations" right?

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