The Knowledge Polity Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences

Drawing on surveys of diverse social science faculty, three acclaimed scholars develop a rich and sometimes surprising portrait of who produces research, teaches students, and contributes to the business of higher education - and how, when, and why.

In The Knowledge Polity, Paul A. Djupe, Amy Erica Smith, and Anand Edward Sokhey envision academics as members of a polity where the primary output is knowledge and citizenship comes with rights and responsibilities. Leveraging the 2017 Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) Study, they develop a theoretically and empirically rich account of who produces knowledge, and how. The data enable an unparalleled understanding of the nature and sources of inequalities by gender and racial or ethnic identification in the disciplines of sociology and political science in the US. To explain those inequalities, the authors consider academics as embedded in institutional and social contexts-including their home lives-and carefully consider their personalities and changing compositions of the academic workforce. A comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis, this book documents patterns that have long been shrouded in anecdote and enables scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences to make empirically-grounded decisions about their individual and collective futures.

Paul A. Djupe is an associate professor of political science at Denison University, affiliated scholar with PRRI, and series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple University Press). His is the author of The Evangelical Crackup? The Future of the Evangelical-Republican
Coalition (2018).

Amy Erica Smith is an associate professor of political science as well as a Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean's Professor at Iowa State University. In the 2020-22 academic years, she is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She is the author of Religion and Brazilian Democracy: Mobilizing the People of God
(2019).

Anand Edward Sokhey is an associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the coauthor of Politics on Display: Yard Signs and the Politicization of Social Spaces (Oxford, 2019).