As I noted awhile back, about 55 nominated evaluators actually pledged to boycott the PGR until I was ousted based on the misrepresentations circulated by the boycott organizers (signatories had no way to know they were misrepresentations, as I also remarked previously). We sent out about 560 evaluations, of which at least 500 I'd estimate got through (this is based partly on what we learned [e.g., hearing from folks after the surveys were over that we had used a rarely checked e-mail address, or that the spam filter ate the invitation etc.] and partly on past experience).
Brit heard from about five or six dozen invited evaluators declining; a half-dozen of them indicated that their reasons were related to the boycott or doubts about rankings, while the rest pointed to unfortunate timing (e.g., middle of job search season, other work obligations, personal crises etc.) and the unusually short time frame for this year's survey. (A dozen or more even went out of their way to say that their inability to participate had nothing to do with the smear campaign or doubts about the PGR.) Several signatories to the boycott statement did participate in the surveys (e.g., Daniel Garber, Eleonore Stump, Mark Scrhoeder, among others), though I haven't tallied up how many precisely since it was a long list, mostly of people who had not been invited to be evaluators (and likely never would be--there's an amusing conceptual question here, can you "boycott" an event to which you are not and never will be invited?).
What to conclude from this? I don't really know. I would assume the majority of the 55 who signed and who did not in the end participate were boycotting (that would certainly explain almsot all of the approximate decline in responses compared to 2011--from about 295 to 230); hopefully, they will participate in the future. But the timing of this year's PGR--in the middle of term and for a shorter time than in the past--also affected the response rate. None of this much matters; we clearly had more than enough respondents, a couple hundred philosophers of distinction both junior and senior, and across enough different fields, to explain why the results are consistent with past surveys which had somewhat more respondents.
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