Understanding the Field of Public Affairs through the Lens of Ranked Ph.D. Programs in the United States

Abstract

The goal of this article is to understand the multidisciplinary field of public affairs. Based on data and text mining on the profiles and publications of all faculty members from a list of research‐oriented U.S. public affairs programs, we describe the landscape of public affairs schools and scholars, identify 15 topics in public affairs research and discuss their trends of change between 1986 and 2015, and show the clustering and hiring networks of public affairs schools. Our results suggest a broader approach to understanding the field of public affairs than the public administration focus in the literature. Although public administration is highly visible in the field, which is evidenced by the journals most favored by public affair scholars, various specific policy areas (such as health, social, urban, environmental, global, and education policies) show strong representations based on our topical analysis of public affairs research.

Thinking in Public about Public Affairs: A Response to, and Expansion of, Zuo, Qian, and Zhao

“…Boundary-spanning problems present a particular challenge for governance as the partitions between organizations and between the issues they monitor become murky (Koski & Workman, 2018;May & Jochim, 2013;May, Jochim, & Sapotichne, 2011). That is, the increasing complexity of many of our most pernicious policy problems demands a greater understanding of the field of public affairs in precisely the fashion that Zuo et al (2019) have undertaken here. Incorporating scholars and Centers working in public affairs, leaving the label aside, would go a long way in understanding many of these patterns.…”

“…First, I address public affairs as an institutional label and the implications of these brick-and-mortar divisions for teaching public affairs as well as research into public problems. These tensions underly much of the empirical analysis in Zuo et al (2019), but my aim here is to lay them bare. From there, I glimpse the contributions to the study of public affairs in its most natural home discipline-political science, where the politics that undergird public affairs is more vivid.…”

“…In “Understanding the Field of Public Affairs through the Lens of Ranked Ph.D. Programs in the United States,” Zuo, Qian, and Zhao () take an innovative approach to discussing the field of public affairs with attention to program, gender, and citation and hiring patterns. The essay that follows is not so much a critique of their approach as it is a plea to the academy to think more broadly about what it means to teach and research in the field of public affairs.…”

The 2019 Public Policy Yearbook: Tracking a Decade of Trends in Public Policy Research

“…In keeping with the Yearbook tradition of reviews, Dr. Samuel Workman was invited to reflect on the article, and Zuo, Qian, and Kang to reply to Workman. Zuo, Qian, and Zhao () use a text mining and network modeling approach to identify the clusters of related schools in the public affairs field, using as a basis data from the National Research Council’s list of 46 PhD‐granting public affairs schools. The data consist of the faculty biographies and publications from each listed school.…”

Thinking in Public about Public Affairs: Rejoinder

“…We appreciate the comments from Professor Samuel Workman on our article “Understanding the Field of Public Affairs through the Lens of Ranked Ph.D. Programs in the United States” published in this Yearbook issue (Zuo, Qian and Zhao, ). In the spirit of interdisciplinarity that characterizes public affairs research, we adopted a text mining approach and borrowed methods in data science in our efforts to describe the field of public affairs.…”