Economists and Their Fan-clubs: The Distribution of Recognition in Russian Economic Science

Abstract

What determines whether economists regard their colleagues’ work as “important” or “meaningful”? While the normative answer is that professional recognition is based solely on the quality of published work, the sociology of science has uncovered other, potentially more insidious factors that influence the conferral of recognition. In this paper, we present the results of a reputation survey of 3563 Russian economists, aimed at identifying the factors that predict the nomination of certain figures as “making an important contribution to economic science”. Our analysis reveals that the most significant predictor of recognition is specialization, particularly in relatively autonomous fields classified in Russia as branches of economics (such as accounting and agrarian economics). Votes were predominantly cast for other specialists in the same field, despite the survey request that participants name those who had made important contributions to Russian economics in general. Other factors influencing voting included (1) orientation towards academic localism or globalism, and the associated inclination to open market economy vs. autarchic national economic systems, and (2) the definition of “contribution to economic sciences” as purely academic or inclusive of participation in policy-making and public debates (borrowing from Ludvik Fleck, one can define the latter dimension as an opposition between “journal” and “newspaper” science). Although our findings reveal marked polarization, we do not find evidence of a total rejection of contributions by authors on other sides of intra-disciplinary divides.