The job market for political scientists showed signs of recovery in the academic year that just ended, according to the American Political Science Association, which is holding its annual meeting this weekend in Seattle.
Nearly half, or 49 percent, of the 816 graduate students in the field who were on the job market last year found permanent academic jobs, according to Jennifer Segal Diascro, director of institutional programs for the association. An additional 24 percent of the candidates took temporary positions, while 19 percent accepted postdoctoral posts and 9 percent found political-science jobs outside academe.
"It appears that despite economic difficulties, political science has not experienced the severe supply-and-demand problem that other disciplines, such as history, have faced," Ms. Segal Diascro writes in the most recent issue of PS: Political Science & Politics.
In the 2010-11 academic year, 1,212 jobs were advertised in the discipline, spanning the range of professorial ranks, as well as temporary and nonacademic positions. Of that total, 521 were for assistant-professor positions, a 17-percent increase over the previous year's total of 445, which was the lowest since 2002-3. The availability of those jobs was encouraging because they "speak most directly to the employment prospects of graduate students and junior faculty," writes Ms. Segal Diascro, and are "the most robust indicator of the health of the market."
The 207 temporary positions accounted for 17 percent of total positions advertised.
The analysis was based on two data sources: the association's job advertisements for academic and nonacademic positions, and its Graduate Placement Survey.
