A buffer zone for the buffer zone.

...his recent essay with the following sentence: "I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me.”

Thanks for this, I will ask, but the idea behind the question is that even when a manuscript is reviewed by folks doing similar work (e.g. formal theory by formal theorists, qualitative by qual) there is more convergence among peer reviewers for certain approaches. Thanks again.

…has there been any effort to demonstrate this empirically?

…formal theory papers were evaluated according to their deductive logic, a criterion that produced uniform reviews, whereas this was not the case for political philosophy. One can make similar distinctions between quantitative treatments versus interpretivist treatments, etc. So, my question is…

…noted that formal theory submissions “almost never gave an adverse review of any manuscript.” Political philosophy had the opposite dynamic: “It was hard to get any consensus among the readers…. I would send it [and] back would come the most wildly varying evaluations.” Obviously, the…

As a matter of policy, the NSF does not release that data.