But with the experiments fad, behavioralist work has been published more frequently than institutionalist work in the big three. So if there's a misalignment, it's one between what the journals want and want hiring committees want.
Presidency and Congress scholars are not getting published anymore in APSR, yet hiring committees want to nab the best and the brightest. So the best and the brightest students run experiments in the hope of scoring a top pub and, in turn, a TT job. But hiring committees also want Congress scholars to teach the AP basics, and so a no-win situation arises.Also, I agree with a lot that's written here, but I don't think the smartest students are going into experiments. The smartest have resisted this particular fad and have paid for it. I'm not sure why they've resisted it, but I would guess that it's because it doesn't provide much room for novel thought or problem solving. In my experience, the smartest gravitate toward normative theory, methods, formal theory or qualitative work, and all but the methods people have paid for it on the job market. It's the mediocre students who have jumped on experiments thinking it was the path to jobs through publications. As you mentioned, many have discovered that it has improved their CVs, but that hasn't translated into offers because their niche is hypercompetitive.
The new "reg y x, r". We've gone from reg monkey to mturk monkey.