As any political scientist knows, it isn't just the formal institutions of government that make a society go; it's the mediating structures. Such as restaurants.

Washington, D.C., once a wasteland of southern hotel food redeemed only by Chesapeake Bay crabs and oysters, is now a city where not even the most fastidious need brown-bag it to feel well fed. There's a restaurant for every taste and budget. What's more, there's Metro and a pretty good supply of taxis for getting to them. Some are within walking distance of the Hilton.

A few words of general counsel. If invited to the White House, the Senate dining room, the House restaurant, the Cosmos Club or the National Press Club, go, but for the company rather than the cuisine. Among these, culinarily speaking, the White House is the best and the Press Club the worst.

This brief essay is written in an attempt to provide a comparison of the reputed quality of political science departments with measures of their productivity. The first study done in the last two decades which purported to assess the “quality” of political science departments was published in 1959 by Hayward Keniston. Keniston's study relied on a survey of the chairpersons of 25 departments and was greatly improved upon by Professors Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus who attempted to measure the strength of political science doctoral programs by drawing a random sample of more than 400 political scientists who were members of the American Political Science Association. In 1966 Professor Allan M. Cartter published the results of his survey of 35 chairpersons, 66 “senior scholars” and 64 “junior scholars” and obtained virtually identical results as the Somit-Tanenhaus study. The results of these studies may be seen in Table 1.

These studies are all valuable additions to the literature; however, the concepts of reputed “quality” or “strength” may suffer from many of the same drawbacks as the concept of reputed “power.”

That is, a department may have a reputation of excellence and yet publish very little. Converse.

Late May, 1979, has been targeted as the release date of data from a pre-presidential pilot study conducted under the supervision of its Board of Overseers by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan. The pilot study is a direct outgrowth of a number of research conferences—on issue voting, party identification and response to leadership—held by the Board during the academic year of 1977–78. The conferences brought together some 60 scholars from across the nation in several locations for the purpose of advising the Board and the Center in preparation for the 1980 presidential study made possible by a long-term national resource grant from the National Science Foundation (for earlier reports on these conferences, see PS, Spring, 1978, pp. 240–242, and PS, Summer, 1978, pp. 342–343). The pilot study was recommended by a smaller group of scholars assembled in Ann Arbor in August, 1978, for the purpose of integrating the many suggestions for future electoral and related research received from the conference participants and from an equal number of other scholars who, because of limited resources, could not be invited to the conferences (for a report on the August workshop, see PS, Fall, 1978, pp. 504–505).