Starting from 1 January 2019, Professor Christina Davis (Harvard University) and Professor Junko Kato (The University of Tokyo) will begin as a new editorial team with the assistance of Ms. Tomoko Yamanojo as managing editor. They take over the journal from Professor Takashi Inoguchi (professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo) who served as the founding editor and has long supported its development as a journal and Ms. Sawaka Ota who served with great dedication as managing editor. We are grateful for their commitment to the journal and look forward to building on their contribution. The articles published in this January issue of JJPS were accepted under the editorship of Professor Inoguchi. Future issues will begin to include those articles submitted under the new editorial team.

Together with a group of leading scholars on the editorial board, Professors Kato and Davis hope to establish JJPS as a top political science journal. They share a commitment to pursue rigorous theoretical and empirical work in the discipline with openness to a diverse range of methodological approaches and all political science subfields. The goal of our team is to publish innovative research that sheds light on important questions in the discipline of political science and/or draws upon other disciplines to offer insights on political behavior and institutions.

We are committed to providing authors with a fair and timely review process. Towards that goal, articles will be received through online submission and are subject to peer review. Manuscripts will normally receive at least two independent reviews. The peer-review process should generally issue a decision to authors within three months. All decisions are reviewed by a member of editorial committee and the editors-in-chief. We reserve the right to desk reject those manuscripts that do not merit external review due to scope or quality. When editors have a conflict of interest such as joint research project, advising relationship, or personal connection, they will recuse themselves from any role in the review process.

The journal will accept articles within three categories: Research articles, research notes, and book review articles. The research notes may include replication, reanalysis, case study narrative, and result-blind papers. Book review articles will cover both materials originally written in English and those in Japanese. Authors should review the instructions for contributors for details on submission categories and requirements. After acceptance, authors must submit their data sets and replication code for all original quantitative analyses discussed in the manuscript.

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Christina Davis and Junko Kato on behalf of the JJPS editorial team