Most popular subfield?

[tomorrows verse]

Not in terms of job availability, since American tends to have the most job openings, but in terms of prospective grad students? One of my profs was saying that while she was working on her PhD, most of the folks she knew at the time were in American, but from the looks of this site (and a lot of the grad student lists on some dept. websites), it seems as though comparative and IR are really gaining in popularity. Do you think this could be a result of globalization--as more future scholars realize what else is happening in the world, the more they want to study it? Just some food for thought while we keep waiting...

[unclejoecannon]

In the last several years the number of American politics applications has been dropping after, while the number of comparative politics and IR applicants has been drastically increasing. Not sure what has caused this but it does present an interesting problem.

[APGradApplicant]

Yes, if this forum is going to be an accurate temperature of the poli sci PhD-seeking population, I would say that it goes from most to least popular:

IR

Comparative

American

Theory

And that's about what I've heard from people familiar with applications these days. That said, is probably true that American seems to have the most job openings of late. Don't know why that is.

[anxiousapplicant]

Yes, if this forum is going to be an accurate temperature of the poli sci PhD-seeking population, I would say that it goes from most to least popular:

IR

Comparative

American

Theory

And that's about what I've heard from people familiar with applications these days. That said, is probably true that American seems to have the most job openings of late. Don't know why that is.

they always need somebody to teach those 101's!

[anxiousapplicant]

true, though there are intro courses for every subfield that many undergrads take, except for possibly methodology:

international relations theory

comparative political systems

political and social thought/any intro to western philosophy course

american politics

methods people could always teach intro stats courses, though.

You're quite right about that, although I've noticed at my own school that there are far more American Government intro courses offered than the other subfield courses, probably because more non-political science majors take the Am gov than the other subfields.

[PeaceDoc]

You're quite right about that, although I've noticed at my own school that there are far more American Government intro courses offered than the other subfield courses, probably because more non-political science majors take the Am gov than the other subfields.

This is absolutely true. My institution requires every student to take two sections of intro American government. That's *a lot* of kids, and requires manymany instructors. This, while only those kids who specialize in a particular subfield of the political science discipline are required to take intro to comparative/ir/etc. There will always be a need for someone to teach constitutional law and intro American, whereas ir/comparative classes tend to be taught in larger or more well heeled institutions. When one considers this, it's odd there are not more judicial scholars than there are.

My own observation is that post 9-11 international politics became much more visible to the general public. As a consequence, interest and enrollment in those undergrad classes, and as a grad student specialization, has gone up (we actually have statistics on class enrollment for the former). While I have only my own observation on this next note, I've also noticed that many students who begin grad school as IR majors end up finishing in comparative. I've been at two grad institutions, one for MA and another for PhD, and IR has been immensely popular at both, but that interest seems to change over time for a couple of reasons. One, because their interests are, in fact, largely regional (e.g., an interest in international terrorism can quickly turn to regional study of the Middle East or of development in general). Two, not to be snide, but many students who go to grad school on a fleeting interest fade quickly. Attrition for phd students in my dept and others I'm familiar with is over 60% from enrollment to completion. Just because one likes to read the World Politics section of the NYT does not mean one wants to plow through a dataset of 250k dyads and learn some ridiculous modeling technique. IR, while intriguing, somewhat sexy, and accessible to the public through media, is probably subject to more misunderstanding by incoming students than any other.

Edited February 24, 2010 by PeaceDoc