Overview

For the first time in our editorship, we are maxing out the page limits allocated to us by APSA and Cambridge University Press, and we are filling issues that will appear six to nine months out from acceptance. Our submission rates have increased 150% since we took over the journal, with an increased interest in symposia making up much of the increase. It is worth noting that our method of tracking and accounting for symposia changed in 2015. Beginning that year, symposia and spotlight contributions have been submitted through Editorial Manager. This contributes to the increased number of submissions for 2015, 2016, and 2017. In those years, respectively, we received 45, 103, and 53 symposia submissions.

Figure 1

PS Submissions Rates

A wealth of content is normally a good thing, but it’s something of a double-edged sword for a journal like PS, which is in part intended to showcase political science scholarship and commentary on issues of public concern. We hope that the introduction of First View will allow us to accept this content and not dissuade authors from submitting.

The 177 articles we published included 318 individual authors. While this represents a significant increase in the number of contributors to PS, only 93 (29%) of the authors were female, which is a slightly smaller percentage of contributors as compared to the last three years. We believe the small decline in female contributors is related to the decline of articles within the Teacher Section of PS which has historically included more female contributors. In line with several articles we recently published examining gender disparities in publication, we recognized this as a problem. We plan to actively work on addressing this gender disparity in the pages of PS by actively recruiting more female scholars to lead symposia, to encourage symposium editors to seek out female contributors, and to continue addressing important issues of gender to the discipline in the pages of PS (see table 2).

Table 2

Gender Distribution by PS Authors

Unfortunately, we do not have reliable data on additional demographic characteristics such as race, academic rank, subfield, or type of institution for authors who published and/or submitted work for publication with PS. ^{Footnote 1} We hope will be able to support and engage APSA and the publications committee this coming year to develop a process for systematically collecting this data. This information will provide us with a better understanding of the current status as well as assist us in working toward increasing the diversity of PS authors and ultimately the quality of content published in the pages of PS.

Breadth and Depth of Content

One of the advantages of PS is that we have a bit more flexibility to solicit content via the Spotlight, Symposia, and Reflections categories, as well as engaging in outreach via social media and e-mail blasts. One result is that we have been able to use our pages to spark political science dialogue across issues. We were also pleased to feature a number of symposia and articles that dealt with international relations, political theory, and comparative politics. PS submissions have been historically skewed toward American politics (and this skew was something that was mentioned by a number of respondents to our readership survey conducted in 2015).

Additional highlights to the past year of PS include several articles examining the issue of gender in the discipline. Two articles which received substantial media attention included Dawn Langan Teele and Kathleen Thelen’s article “Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science” and Amy Atchison’s article “Negating the Gender Citation Advantage in Political Science.” These articles clearly address an important issue facing the discipline and we look forward to continuing this dialogue for the profession in the pages of PS. Similarly, Marc Lynch, Curtis R. Ryan, and Morten Valbjørn’s symposium examining “The Arab Uprisings and International Relations Theory” highlights the critical role of the discipline in examining our constantly changing world and the importance of subfields to work together.

A brief review of our four issues starts with the October “Elections Issue,” which included our traditional forecasting symposium edited by James E. Campbell plus 22 additional election articles within the politics, profession, and teaching sections. We sent out a solicitation for submissions to a number of political science e-mail lists and posted the call on the Political Science Facebook page. We were heartened—and a bit overwhelmed—by the enthusiastic response. The articles included in this issue ranged from David Anderson’s reflections on the Iowa Caucus and Diana Mutz’s analysis of the relationship between Harry Potter consumption and support for Donald Trump to Cohen et al.’s reassessment of the role of political parties in the nomination process and Herbert F. Weisberg’s reflections on the collaboration that resulted in The American Voter.

The October issue also included an exciting symposium examining the field of political science from the perspective of Europe. Guest edited by Stokemer, Rashkova, Moses, and Blair, this symposium provided PS readers with a European perspective on several critical issues facing political scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.

The 2017 volume issue kicked off the 50th volume of PS, and we decided to mark this milestone in a tongue-in-cheek fashion by digging into the archives and republishing a report on the 1975 APSA Annual Convention in San Francisco. It was fascinating not just to see how the major topics of interest have changed over 40 years, but also that APSA used to organize charter plane flights to the conference, as well as arranging a post-conference trip to Hawaii!

The January 2017 issue also featured an important symposium on ethnographic methods in political science, edited by Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Samantha Majic, articles discussing the legacy of President Barack Obama, and a symposium addressing the legacy of Professor George C. Edwards, a leading scholar of the American presidency who had announced his retirement. This issue also included two sets of point/counterpoint articles, the first on research transparency in political science, and the second on reducing bias in political science estimates.

Inspired by the start of the baseball season, the April 2017 cover of PS included a set of “presidential playing cards” provided by Professor Jon Bond, and was linked to an article by Bond along with Manuel P. Teodoro on “What Can Sabermetrics Teach Us About Presidential Success?” This issue contained the aforementioned articles on gender bias in political science by Thelen and Teele and by Atchison; a symposium discussing the legacy of Daniel Patrick Moynihan; and a fascinating discussion of the politics of the knowledge economy and higher education. This issue also witnessed the initiation of a new symposium series, The Annual Guide to Choosing Your ……… Textbook. The aim of the symposium is to provide faculty with a simple and useful resource to assist with selecting their textbooks. We plan to include in each April issue of PS a review of several textbooks for 4–6 courses regularly offered in political science curricula.

Our final issue for this review appears in July 2017. We are pleased that this issue includes three symposia that are not focused on the United States: the first on the Arab uprising and international relations, the second a forecasting symposium on German elections, and the third a discussion of Canadian politics at the 150th anniversary of confederation. The issue also contains a symposium on the “Berkeley School” of political theory and a “reflections” article from the primary movers at #womenalsoknowstuff.

From the Sections and Reflections

Our intention with creating the “From the Sections” and “Reflections’ subsections was to provide a broader outlet for the excellent content that has been appearing in many of the organized section newsletters and/or informally online within the discipline and which merits wider dissemination among our membership. “From the Sections” contains articles that have been nominated by section newsletter editors and are deemed of sufficient importance and interest to be disseminated to the entire discipline. “Reflections” provides authors an opportunity to submit non-anonymized essays on mentoring, research, graduate and undergraduate education, or other reflections on their experiences in the profession. Two excellent examples of the content in each of these new subsections are Kelly Ditmar’s From the Sections article, “Watching Elections 2016 with a Gender Lens” and Herbert Weisberg’s Reflections on “The Michigan Four and Their Study of American Voters: A Biography of a Collaborations.”

Symposia and Spotlights

Symposia have become an important part of the journal’s portfolio (table 4). As one of the only outlets in the profession to publish a thematic discussion about one particular topic, PS plays an important role. We now categorize symposia under the heading which is most appropriate. For example, we’ve published “The ‘Berkeley School’ of Political Theory: A Discussion of its Beginnings, its Development, and the Disagreements over Calling it A ‘School’” in the Profession section. The Teacher section has seen “‘Disembodied Shades’: Teaching the Territories of the United States” published under its heading.

We are also working to revive our Spotlight category. We published one Spotlight in January 2015, which was well received. We have a Spotlight on “Policy Conflicts between Cities and States” slated for the January 2018 issue. A Spotlight is a set of timely articles on a single topic or related topics. The Spotlight content category is intended to provide an outlet for short and topical treatments of emerging issues of interest to the profession. We welcome Spotlight contributions on topics that originated as a roundtable at a conference, or a series of blog postings, or even informal discussions on social media. We continue to welcome proposals for Spotlight topics.