What Incentive Structures Do to Political Philosophy
Epistemic Pathologies and Institutional Design
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11340967 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Simon Stevens (0000-0002-8570-9072, De Montfort University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy & Social Criticism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0191-4537 • E-ISSN: 1461-734X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/01914537261438156 |
| OpenAlex | W7140281554 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
Political philosophers increasingly work within institutional environments shaped by metrified evaluation, hypercompetition, and publish-or-perish expectations. This article does not argue that political philosophy has empirically declined or become uniformly conservative. On the contrary, contemporary political theory shows significant pluralisation, including greater visibility for feminist, decolonial, ethnographic, and public-facing approaches. The central claim is instead that prevailing incentive structures generate predictable epistemic pathologies. By systematically rewarding work that is strategically legible, rapidly publishable, and easily refereed, they discourage slower, riskier, and more conceptually ambitious inquiry – especially among early-career scholars whose professional survival depends on repeated publication in a narrow set of high-status venues. Drawing on analyses of perverse incentives in the sciences, the article shows how analogous dynamics operate within political philosophy. It concludes by arguing that reforms to hiring, publishing, and evaluation practices could better align professional incentives with the epistemic goods political philosophy has reason to value
Incentive · Political philosophy · Politics · Set (abstract data type · Visibility · Work (physics · Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Science Research and Education
Academic Research in the 21st Century
The natural selection of bad science
Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications
A Defense of Minimalist Liberalism
Philosophy as Cultural Politics
The Reality of the ‘Publish or Perish’ Concept, Perspectives from the Global South
Academic anomie
What Are Data Good for Anyway
Normative behaviourism as a solution to four problems in realism and non-ideal theory
Political philosophy and the nature of expertise
Should we be writing at a time like this? Reflections on abolition, political science, and international relations
What’s that smell? Bullshit jobs in higher education
Public political philosophy in Poland
Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule
The relationship between political philosophy and political science
Fieldwork in Political Theory
Dilemmas in a general theory of planning
Neoliberalism and Geography
Political Theory in an Ethnographic Key
The View from Below
Political Philosophy's Methodological Moment and the Rise of Public Political Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |