Before we introduce the excellent research, which we proudly publish in this new issue of the American Political Science Review, we want to start our Notes from the Editors with discussing an issue facing many journals: conserving and refreshing the reviewer pool. Following the trend of previous years, we experienced an increase in submissions over the past twelve months, amounting to more than 1,200 manuscripts. Accordingly, we sent out more than 4,000 invitations to review. We would like to use this opportunity to thank the more than 1,900 reviewers who completed in total 2,272 reviews, which is an increase of accepted invitations by almost five percent. At the same time, the growing number of submissions indicate a dilemma facing editors: while we feel encouraged by the growing number of submissions, the reviewer pool remains limited. If we invite our colleagues to review too often, we risk increasing the widely observed reviewer fatigue, leading not only to a lower response rate to our invitations, but also a lower quality of reviews.

Our response has been to focus on the desk rejection rate, not only by our lead editor, but through our associate editors as well. Since taking on the editorship, we have increased the desk rejection rate by about ten percentage points to 39%. Furthermore, the rate remains similar across genders: submissions from solo female authors and solo male authors are desk rejected about 45% of the time. Team submissions are comparatively more successful. Both all female teams, all male teams, and mixed gender teams are desk rejected about one third of the time. Naturally, we have received criticism for this decision; however, in doing this we have been able to simultaneously reduce the rate of rejection after review to about 53% and conserve our reviewer pool. Moreover, while the relative increase in desk rejections was higher among solo female authors than among solo male authors, who already had higher desk rejection rates in previous editorial teams, we would like to stress that we kept the overall rejection rate constant both in the aggregate as well as across gender. We understand the disappointment of desk-rejected authors, but we hope that this decision helps maintain not only the pool of reviewers, but also a high standard of reviews, which helps to improve authors’ future research.

Turning to the articles that made it through this rigorous review process, we present thirteen articles and one letter from various fields within political science. We start with a timely article on how anti-globalization sentiments affected the Brexit Leave vote. Several articles deal with agency in electoral politics, policy change, representatives’ decision-making behavior, and accountability in developed and developing country contexts. Scattered throughout the issue, we have three political theory articles that feature a commonly invoked, albeit rarely successfully attained, blending of the history of political thought with contemporary debates in political theory and philosophy to illuminate lessons for ongoing political dilemmas. We are publishing two articles that study the relationship between governments and the elite. One article uses machine learning to predict violence through newspaper articles and another explores the measurement validity of the index of emancipative values. There is an article that examines how railroads were instrumental in the spread of political Islam in interwar Egypt. Finally, this issue also features the first political theory letter on the capacity of public reason.

In “Global Competition and Brexit,” Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig explore the adverse effects of globalization and how this impacted the Brexit vote to leave the European Union by evaluating a shock of imports from China that drove diverging economic performances in the UK. While many scholars have explained Brexit solely as the result of increased immigration from the EU, this article further analyzes the effect of economics on shaping citizens’ opinions about immigration wherein populations struggling with economic hardship due to global competition voice discontent with their economic situation in the form of the Leave vote. A fascinating implication of this article suggests that anti-globalization, rather than racism, could be the culprit of the rise of populism.

Drawing on recent concerns articulated in the pages of the APSR and other journals concerning partisanship and its possible influence on democratic society, Joel E. Landis invokes the work of David Hume as an unlikely but fruitful source of political insight in “Whither Parties? Hume on Partisanship and Political Legitimacy.” In light of theoretical claims for the benefits of partisanship in contradiction with empirical evidence demonstrating that these benefits may not be realized in practice, Landis turns to Hume for an alternative model of partisanship. Because parties affect the opinions of allegiance, which to Hume make government legitimacy possible, Landis argues, they may either hurt or help the “entire project of society” independent of their contribution to democratic life.

Who are the political consultants behind the firms hired by congressional campaigns to produce campaign advertisements is the main question behind Gregory J. Martin and Zachary Peskowitz's article, “Agency Problems in Political Campaigns: Media Buying and Consulting.” Using novel data consisting of Federal Election Commission expenditures, Nielsen advertising data, and ideological positions of consultants, Martin and Peskowitz analyze the principal-agent relationship concerning expenditures to the third-party advertising firms. Their research finds that inexperienced, first-time candidates and PACs are subject to higher markups, and Republican candidates are charged higher prices while they receive less effort and responsiveness for their dollar than do their Democratic counterparts. Most interestingly, this research is generalizable outside of the US context given that many US political consultancies work in electoral campaigns in other democracies, even in countries with much stricter election laws.

In “Policy Preferences and Policy Change: Dynamic Responsiveness in the American States, 1936–2014,” Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw provide the most compelling evidence to date regarding the mechanisms by which US state governments become more or less representative of state publics. Building on their previous methodological work developing comparable dynamic state-level estimates of public liberalism, they compare these estimates to measures of government policy based on over one hundred policies measured for each state annually. This enables a clear demonstration that responsiveness is a gradual process of policy following opinion rather than one strongly punctuated by changes in partisan control of state legislatures. While some of the measures used have appeared in previous articles published by the same authors, this application to the dynamics of representation yields a far clearer picture of this key element of democratic governance than has previously been available.

In his article, “The Deliberative Sublime: Edmund Burke on Disruptive Speech and Imaginative Judgment,” Rob Goodman argues that political life may require “unsettling speech” by exploring Edmund Burke's response to contemporary debates on civility suggesting that rhetoric (not only, but particularly, that characterized by excess or “the uncanny”) makes a powerful and inimitable contribution to deliberation, in Burke's time and ours. Shifting masterfully between historical contextualization, a close reading of Burke, and contemporary debates on “incivility,” Goodman manages to weave together a powerful case that passionate rhetoric—which Burke called the “rhetorical sublime”—does not erode the quality of democratic deliberation, but may actually enhance it by facilitating greater capacity for feeling and judgment on the part of the audience.

“Information Dissemination, Competitive Pressure, and Politician Performance between Elections: A Field Experiment in Uganda” by Guy Grossman and Kristin Michelitch is an ambitious study that carefully tests a key argument in the political science literature regarding how politicians can be held accountable effectively. While regular elections have attracted much attention as a key mechanism for political accountability, Grossman and Michelitch ask how greater transparency via the delivery of neutral information improves the performance of politicians and the delivery of public services. Their research design consists of a multiyear experiment with extensive scope and scale that provides detailed, salient, and novel information to all participants. They capture a politician's performance in varying formats from multiple surveys to different measures of public services. The novel insights of the study show that even between elections, greater transparency, which is communicated well to both politicians and voters, helps improve the performance of politicians—but only in electorally competitive contexts.

“Nonrepresentative Representatives: An Experimental Study of the Decision Making of Elected Politicians,” by Lior Sheffer, Peter John Loewen, Stuart Soroka, Stefaan Walgrave, and Tamir Sheafer, examines whether politicians are subjected to the same choice anomalies and behavioral traits that characterize citizens’ decision-making. By surveying several hundred members of the national and regional parliaments in Belgium, Israel, and Canada and comparing politicians’ performance on the choice anomalies to citizens’ in each country, they find that politicians are susceptible to the same biases in decision-making at rates similar to or even more than citizens. The article challenges the body of political science literature that posits that elected politicians are rational and strategically oriented actors who, unlike citizens, tend to escape choice anomalies. It successfully crosses subfields within political science while engaging with economics and psychology, and its findings will improve our understanding of important political decisions.

In his article, “Businesspeople in Elected Office: Identifying Private Benefits from Firm-Level Returns,” David Szakonyi explores the impact of businesspeople's entrance into politics on their firms’ performances by examining whether businesspeople who become legislators in Russia have used their positions to benefit their own firms. To test this impact, Szakonyi employs an original dataset of about 2,700 politically connected firms in Russia and a regression discontinuity design, which uses close elections to compare firms linked to narrowly winning contenders with those of narrowly losing contenders. The study's findings include an increase of 60% in revenue and 15% in profit margins for firms connected to winning candidates, procurement contract opportunities as the underlying mechanism by which companies benefit from these political relationships, and that the value of a won seat is increased in politically competitive and in wealthier regions but falls with greater competition from other rent-seekers. The article not only contributes to the study of the relationship between democratization, rent-seeking, and corruption, but adds to the research on political institutions in hybrid and nondemocratic regimes, with evidence on how legislative elections might be used to distribute rents among elites and interest groups.

Francisco Garfias develops a novel theory to explain the development of state capacity in his article, “Elite Competition and State Capacity Development: Theory and Evidence from Post-Revolutionary Mexico.” In contrast to research focusing on Europe and the role of international conflict, this study considers domestic political conflict between the political and economic elite as the driver of state capacity. Garfias employs an innovative quasi-experimental setup from post-revolutionary Mexico that utilizes the Great Depression as an exogenous negative economic shock that weakens the economic elite and allows the political elite to consolidate its authority. Novel data in this research show areas that were affected by this shock and those that were not experienced similar levels of land redistribution and state capacity prior to the treatment, while a stronger negative shock induced a greater increase in state capacity via climbing numbers in bureaucrats. These findings demonstrate that the effect of the Great Depression on Mexico's state capacity continues to the present day. This study provides interesting new insights into a fundamental question in political science using an innovative research design and novel data.

In their article, “Reading Between the Lines: Prediction of Political Violence Using Newspaper Text,” Hannes Mueller and Christopher Rauh present a new method of predicting armed conflicts based on analysis of newspaper reports. The study employs the latent Dirichlet allocation model to generate quantitative summaries of the news reports, thus reducing the vast text to meaningful topics. This is followed by an analysis of within-country variation, which predicts the beginning of an armed conflict in the following year. Mueller and Rauh's proposed methodology for predicting conflicts forecasts not only whether, but also when a conflict will break out, and is well suited to predict conflicts in previously peaceful countries, which provides an early warning for countries that did not experience a conflict before. In comparison to the existing methods of text analysis, this method enables a deeper analysis as it captures contextual changes and provides width through the use of the full text.

Steven Brooke and Neil Ketchley explore the conditions that enabled the rise of organized political Islam in their article, “Social and Institutional Origins of Political Islam,” by focusing on the origin and mobilization of the Muslim Brotherhood in interwar Egypt. This study is one of a few attempts to derive and test hypotheses from an otherwise disconnected literature. By combining extensive historic data on Muslim Brotherhood branches, census data, missionary archival records, and maps of Egypt's infrastructure and railroads with a mixed methods research design, Brooke and Ketchley identify specific characteristics that aided the Brotherhood in spreading political Islam. Most notably, they find that the following conditions helped the Brotherhood establish branches in certain areas: the rise of literacy rates, the availability of economic infrastructure, small European populations, and weak local governments. These findings challenge the common contact theory that the spread of political Islam occurred as a result of the interaction between the West and Muslims, and hopefully encourage further research in this region using similar methods.

Boris Sokolov's article, “The Index of Emancipative Values: Measurement Model Misspecifications,” demonstrates multiple noninvariant measurements across cultures and countries within the index of emancipative values (EVI), the most recent representative of value indices derived from the modernization-emancipation theory. It uses a novel approximate Bayesian approach showing that one subcomponent of the EVI known as “pro-choice values”—indicating how acceptable people find homosexuality, abortion, and divorce—may be used instead as a reliable estimator of cross-national differences related to the emancipation process. This article also contributes to the literature by exploring whether emancipative values are a reflective or a formative construct through the use of thought experiments and real data examples to support the former interpretation. This article's implications go beyond the modernization-emancipation theory and successfully increase awareness that measurement validity of any survey-based measure should not be assumed, but instead empirically tested.

Duncan Bell's article, “Pragmatism and Prophecy: H. G. Wells and the Metaphysics of Socialism,” asserts that H. G. Wells—one of the most celebrated, prolific, and influential intellectuals of his time—deserves a closer look from the perspective of political theory and philosophy. Employing a contextualist approach that draws on a wide variety of archival and published sources, Bell argues that Wells's pragmatist philosophy, merged with evolutionary theory, informed a distinctive cosmopolitan socialist vision that requires a rethinking both of British socialism and political thought, as well as of the history of pragmatism. This article sheds new light on the works of one of the greatest and most controversial political theorists.

In his letter, “Convergence's Democracy Problem: A Critique of Kogelmann and Stich,” Benjamin R. Hertzberg delivers a strong intervention to an ongoing debate about the capacity of public reason, as articulated in the work of John Rawls and others, to provide assurance that citizens of a plural, liberal polity will act in accordance with their view of justice and so consolidate political stability. By engaging a recent 2016 APSR article by Brian Kogelmann and Stephen G. W. Stitch, “When Public Reason Fails Us: Convergence as Blood Oath,” Hertzberg does more than simply respond to an academic provocation. The strength of this short article lies in how it uses effective counterexamples and draws on broader literature on religion and public life to forge a distinctive perspective on a longstanding and nuanced debate over how liberal citizens forge enduring relationships of civic trust.