The other day, I wrote about how APSA annual membership fees aren’t quite as expensive as they may seem in the context of other large, primary scholarly organizations in the social sciences and history. Yes, the economists and the ISA may charge a lot less, but it seems like the AEA is a crazy outlier (as they are in conference fees) and ISA isn’t quite a primary disciplinary organization in the same way that APSA, ASA, AAA, and AHA are.
But on Facebook, someone challenged me that this might not be the entire story. In this day, hardly anyone joins a scholarly oranization if they’re not either on the job market or going to the annual convention, and membership fees are largely calibrated to be just about the difference between the member and the non-member registration rate for the annual meeting. So maybe APSA is a bad deal, but that only becomes relevant when we look at the total cost of attending the annual meeting.
I went back to the Web and found some data. I quickly discovered that the economists are maybe the worst possible reference group for social sciences and humanities disciplines. Not only does AEA have relatively low membership dues, AEA also charges very little ($115!) for annual meeting registration. This suggests to me that AEA operates under a very different business model than the other leading social science disciplinary organizations, especially since (inasmuch as a few seconds’ Googling can be held to be research) AEA doesn’t have all that many more members. I suspect the difference comes in Big Science institutional support, probably some wealthy members’ bequests, and (maybe most important) convention hall exhibition fees and a different ownership structure for AER and other association journals.
The bottom line: Don’t compare APSA to AEA. They’re not in the same field.
Continue reading “APSA Membership Dues and Annual Meeting Fees in Context”
Some political scientists–okay, a lot of people–wonder why membership fees for the American Political Science Association’s fees are so high. In particular, folks compare APSA fees, which can be steep (a maximum of $325 per year for high-income political scientists), to fees for the American Economic Association, which max out at…$40 annually.
A few months ago, I wrote a summary of the political-science literature on institutional design and turnout in local elections (municipal elections and other local government elections), which I share here. The takeaway: local governments may have lots of room to develop policies that promote turnout. The moral point: adopting policies that drive down turnout in the knowledge that they will do so is not canny but actively unethical.