Kieran Healy and Steve Vaisey, dissatisfied with the NRC rankings of sociology departments, set up their own “system for pairwise ranking of political science departments”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/07/crowdsourcing-sociology-department-rankings/. The idea is straightforward – people clicking on the webpage they have set up are given two randomly chosen sociology departments and asked to say which is better. These pairwise comparisons can be used to construct an overall universe of reputational rankings. So far, they “have gotten”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/sociology-department-rankings-now-with-added-legitimacy/ 65,000 votes on their ranking page. Kieran and Steve have now “set up a similar ranking system for political science programs”:http://www.allourideas.org/poliscirankings. You are all hereby encouraged to go to the site, click vigorously and provide reputational data.
UPDATE – From communication with Kieran, it appears that the initial seed population was taken from the top 100 philosophy departments. It is, however, possible to suggest new universities using the ‘make your voice heard: add your own idea’ button. So people who wish to include universities that were not on the initial list should do so, and do so promptly.