For a discipline that lies beyond the boundaries of what traditionally has been considered the domain of the humanities, political science has not fared badly at the endowment established to promote humanistic knowledge. However, that is a subjective judgment: One of the dubious charms of the NEH has been its failure, until recently, to implement a data collection and retrieval system that could yield information concerning the magnitude of support received by a given discipline. At long last an ADP system, known to its friends as AUGUSTUS (its enemies call it other things), is undergoing debugging. It is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of the current fiscal year.

Two additional factors make it difficult to isolate grants awarded in political science. The Endowment, unlike the National Science Foundation, divides its workload principally by the type of audiences at which funded projects are aimed—e.g., the general public, research scholars, educators, community groups—rather than by discipline. Thus, just as there is no English program, so there is no political science program at the Endowment. Projects conducted by political scientists are eligible to compete in all of the funding categories administered by the Divisions of Fellowships, Research Grants, Public Programs, and Education Programs. To the extent that they express local or regional interests and involve a general out-of-school public, they may also compete for funds offered by the State Humanities Committees which serve as regrant agencies for the Endowment.

How many things by season season'd are.

To their right praise and true perfection!

Merchant of Venice, i, 107

In 1958 the American Political Science Association initiated the first of what were to be a number of awards for outstanding dissertations. In that year the Leonard D. White Memorial Award was established “… for the best doctoral dissertation within the general field of public administration.” This was followed, in turn, by the Edward S. Corwin Award (1973) “… for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public law,” the Helen Dwight Reid Award (1965) “… for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of international relations,” and the E. E. Schattschneider Award (1971) “… for the best dissertation completed and accepted in the general field of American Government and Politics.” More recently, the Leo Strauss (1974), the William Anderson (1975), and the Gabriel A. Almond (1976) Awards have been established for the best dissertations in the fields of political philosophy, international relations and comparative politics, respectively.

This is the seventh report on the experience of new political scientists looking for jobs. Two years have passed since the last report, which was based upon placement data for 1977. In this report on placement data collected in 1978 and 1979, there are some changes in who succeeds in finding jobs and in what kinds of jobs they find. These changes may be an indication of professional adjustment to the realities of the academic job market.

The 1977 placement report examined the academic job market for political scientists in the next two decades, and pointed out that the projected decline in college enrollments until 1994 means that nearly all of the positions open to new faculty will be generated by the need to replace current faculty who die, retire or move to non-teaching jobs. Since the median age of political scientists is in the mid-30s, we were told that there will be few openings due to retirements until the mid-1990s. And, we were left with the question as to whether, in view of the limited supply of academic job opportunities, the profession will make changes in its graduate curricula and/or its placement strategies. In addressing this question with respect to the 1978 and 1979 placement classes, it is useful to summarize what has remained constant in the placement of political scientists in order to highlight what has changed.

The purpose of this paper is to communicate, a la Dawson (1978) and Frey (1980) the what and how of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Cybernetics Technology Division's (DARPA/CTD) social science research funding. It is hoped that it will make some, who may have asked “What's a DARPA?” while perusing the Table of Contents, aware of another possible funding source and will enhance the relevance to the DARPA mission of proposals received by the Division.

The data presented here were initially compiled as part of a background report for the May 19–20, 1980, meeting for oversight review of the NSF Political Science Program. These data on proposed loads, funding levels, and success rates are from the Foundation's proposal information data base. In sharp contrast to the criteria by which proposals submitted to the Program are reviewed, my goal here is purely desriptive. No attempt at explanation is ventured here beyond indicating a few specifics that seem important in interpreting changes in the data series.

We are engaged in a study of the current and past condition of party organizations in the United States. The research examines parties within an institutional framework and seeks to measure the strength of party organizations at the national, state, and local levels. But in order to compare parties over time it is necessary to have longitudinal data. The purpose of this note is to ask interested researchers to share with us documented data on state party central committee staff and annual operating budgets or expenditures for the period 1960–1978. We would also appreciate suggestions for sources of such data for any of the state parties.

Table 1 presents the state party central committee budget and staff data collected to date. The 21-year period 1960–1980 yields 2,100 possible data points for the 100 state party organizations. We have collected budget data for 964 (45.9 percent) and staff data for 1,000 (47.6 percent) of the data points. These data have come from a variety of sources:

1. interviews with state party officials in 27 sample states (states selected for analysis in the cross-sectional portion of our research;

2. questionnaires sent to 556 former state party chairmen;

3. surveys by Roland H. Ebel, Cornelius P. Cotter, and Bernard C. Hennessy;

4. data collected and generously made available by William J. Crotty;

5. Jerome M. Mileur's 1977 survey of state party central committees;

6. Robert J. Huckshorn's collection of state party data;

7. surveys conducted by the Democratic National Committee in 1962, the Republican National Committee in 1968–69, and by the president of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen in 1974.