Matthew Effect and public administration research: An analysis of the relationship of institutional prestige to research funding levels and departmental research productivity at U.S. schools of public administration

The Matthew Effect is a biblical metaphor coined by Derek de Solla Price to describe a violation of Robert K. Merton's Norms of Science particularly the Norm of Universalism. It is based on the principle of accumulative advantage operating in socially stratified systems to produce the same result: the rich get richer at a rate that makes the poor become relatively poorer. Prestige attracts a disproportionate share of scarce resources available for research. Applying the Matthew Effect theory to public administration research revealed for the first time in the discipline that the most prestigious institutions did attract more research funding than their less prestigious counterparts. Using measures of prestige, research funding, and research productivity, a series of bivariate and multivariate analyses were run on the sample survey data from 69 respondent U.S. schools of public administration. The results indicated that the schools rated as prestigious did attract more funding and schools that were better funded did more research. Also, schools that actively sought grants achieved more grant funding. However, the reverse was not true. The increased funding levels and increased research productivity did not influence prestige in the short-run. The results support the literature from sociology and education that prestige, funding and productivity are positively related but that prestige is not enhanced in the short-term by higher levels of research productivity or funding. The existence of the Matthew Effect operating on the discipline of public administration was confirmed. The dissertation also focused attention on the relative effects of productivity and prestige on funding levels using grant-getting activities as a measure of faculty research productivity. The results demonstrated that prestige outweighed grant-getting activity, but was not the sole determinate in establishing funding levels.