On August 25, 2016, we started our editorship of the Review. During these first ten months, we processed a record high number of submissions—999 new manuscripts, 92 revisions, and 157 manuscripts already under review from the previous team. In addition to introducing early online publication through FirstView and Letters as a new publication format, we changed the editorial process to reduce turnaround duration and reviewer fatigue. For the first time since 2012/13, the time spent from submission to editor decision decreased. We also decided to increase the amount of desk rejections which further reduced overall turnaround times and increased the share of invited reviewers per manuscript. We note that the increase in desk rejections was compensated by a decrease of rejections after review.

Compared to these encouraging numbers, the distribution of submissions and acceptances across fields and methods remained relatively stable. Comparative politics papers still dominate our submission sample, followed by american politics, normative political theory, and international relations. Quantitative studies lead in terms of approach, but interpretative studies come second, followed by qualitative and formal studies at much lower levels. We also observe that the share of male contributions is slightly decreasing and compensated by submissions from mixed gender teams of authors.

Apart from these numbers, which we will provide in more detail in our Editorial Report as part of our promise to increase transparency of the editorial process, we notice a declining trend in the two-year impact factor of the Review. Over time, FirstView should help to change this declining visibility trend, which started after 2012. On closer inspection, we also find that the five-year impact factor of the Review continues to rise and that our pluralist publication strategy, which includes publishing in all subfields and methods in political science, increases the long-term visibility of our publications.

We have received applause and criticism in the past ten months of our editorship. Unsurprisingly, these two kinds of responses highly correlate with outcomes, but we intend to continue with our transparency policy, which includes the provision of data and materials of APSR articles. We continue to collaborate with APSA and Cambridge University Press to incorporate tools which may increase transparency and ease of use of our publications, such as Overleaf and Dataverse. We are curious about how our authors respond to these innovations, as we already observe an increasing number of letters submissions, which may also expand our interdisciplinary author- and readership.

This issue starts off with an article tackling the role of the middle class in democratization. The following article then examines the different dynamics of voter turnout in new democracies. We move on to articles on state development more generally examining various questions concerning the importance of institutions as well as the reasons for unfinished development projects more specifically. After learning about a new interpretation of Habermas's perspective on religion, the following articles deal with aspects of partisanship both from a conceptual perspective as well as from an empirical perspective on policy uptake. The next article presents novel empirical evidence on the question of economic voting. We have three distinctive articles on violence and conflict, ranging from explaining redemptive violence in Jacobin political thought, the effects of mass killings on property transfers, and a new understanding Kant's anticolonialism as securing peace in Europe and not for humanitarian reasons. Our final piece, which is the first letter we are publishing, introduces a new tool to help researchers use crowdsourced coding and measures of political texts.

A rising middle class has been associated with democratization, but the literature is limited concerning which middle class groups contribute most toward that goal, especially in nondemocratic settings. In her study, “Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm: A Case-Control Study of Democratic Protest Coalitions in Russia,” Bryn Rosenfeld argues that by splitting the middle class into state- and private-sector workers, we can disentangle countries which are more likely to experience democratization and those not. Pivotal to her argument is the condition that state-dependent workers weaken support for democratization, especially in countries with a large public sector. Using surveys conducted in Russia during mass demonstrations after the 2011–2012 elections and population data, her results show that public-sector workers were less likely to mobilize, even when controlling for ideology. Not only does she introduce a new approach to studying protests in case-control methods of epidemiology, but also the implications of her research, that the middle class can have a much more diverse effect on democratization than previously believed, could have profound effects for the stability of authoritarian regimes and democratization in general.

Evidence since 1939 questions whether democratic consolidation is the culprit of global declines in voter turnout. In “Does Democratic Consolidation Lead to a Decline in Voter Turnout? Global Evidence Since 1939,” a study of worldwide legislative elections between 1939 and 2015, Filip Kostelka argues against this perspective by disentangling the various dynamics of voting rates in new democracies and comparing them to similar dynamics in established democracies. In a democratization context, he contends, there is a surge of voter turnout that subsides over time as its salience decreases and the rates return to a normal baseline. In terms of democratic consolidation, voter turnout decreases occur only in postcommunist countries. Finally, he demonstrates that new democracies only mirror their established counterparts, which have been have experienced declining voting rates since the 1970s.

In U.S. federal and state constitutions, the separation of power is very pronounced with governors and assemblies having independent power bases. How did this hallmark of U.S. constitutions evolve? In his thought-provoking article, “Building a New Imperial State: The Strategic Foundations of Separation of Powers in America,” Sean Gailmard argues that to understand the origins of separation of powers in the U.S. we must look at the era of English colonies in North America. He argues that what nowadays is a natural institution, is the result of an institutional choice of a strategic English crown confronted with agency problems. To develop the argument, Gailmard sets up a formal model with repeated interactions of the crown, the governor, and the settlers. Interestingly, the model suggests that separation of powers was neither invoked to control the crown (by an assembly), nor invented by the crown to tie its own hands, but designed to empower settlers to restrain the governor. Why was this distinct form of a separation of powers unique to North America? The model suggests that unlike colonies that provided opportunities for natural resource extraction, economic growth in the North American colonies required investments of settlers in agriculture. In a broader perspective, Gailmard offers a new way of looking at the evolution of an important institution—a perspective that will certainly be taken up by research in a range of other, colonial or authoritarian, contexts of institutional choice.

Powersharing institutions are often proposed to stabilize countries recovering from armed conflict or those with deeply divided societies. Yet, we have little systematic evidence on what types of powersharing successfully foster democratic stability under different scenarios. In their article, “Safeguarding Democracy: Powersharing and Democratic Survival,” Benjamin A.T. Graham, Michael K. Miller, and Kaare W. Strøm identify and distinguish between inclusive, dispersive, and constraining de jure powersharing institutions. Outlining their distinctive impact on democratic legitimacy and accountability, the authors derive specific expectations of how each type of powersharing is likely to affect democratic survival in general, but also in particular in postconflict societies. Using a global dataset from 1975–2010, their analyses show that only constraining powersharing, such as independent judiciaries and strong protections of civil rights and liberties, fosters democratic survival in all analyzed political contexts. Dispersive powersharing is shown to be harmful to democratic survival in postconflict societies, while inclusive powersharing improves the chances of democratic survival in such contexts. Their study highlights the importance of carefully differentiating and theorizing the impact of different policy instruments under various contexts, as the one-size-fits-all approach is not only ineffective but might even have a detrimental impact on societies.

Launching development projects is a popular endeavor among donor and recipient countries, but only a fraction of them is finished. The article, “The Political Economy of Unfinished Development Projects: Corruption, Clientelism, or Collective Choice?,” by Martin J. Williams derives observable implications from three competing explanations to improve our understanding of this phenomenon, namely whether unfinished projects in developing countries are a product of corruption in implementing the public services, misallocation of public expenditure, or the result of a collective choice process where political actors face commitment problems due to limited resources. The explanations are tested against an original dataset comprising information on 14,000 small-scale projects in Ghana. The author draws on rich qualitative knowledge about politics and decision making in Ghana and runs a series of models to comparatively test the three explanatory accounts. The study finds that collective choice processes suffering from inconsistencies account best for the data. While these findings have theoretical consequences, the practical consequences truly highlight the importance of this research, i.e., the extent to which wasteful expenditure in areas that need services harms communities and the impact of improved fiscal institution can have on monitoring project completion and mindful spending can have in these settings.

In his article, “Taking Religion Seriously? Habermas on Religious Translation and Cooperative Learning in Post-secular Society,” Giorgi Areshidze supports an innovative and challenging new interpretation of Habermas with a sympathetic and nuanced example of religious reasoning in public space. Areshidze examines Habermas's recent attempt to “take religion seriously” by treating religious claims as potentially meaningful truths for public discussion. He argues, however, that although Habermas's views do important work in laying bare the foundationalism (and what Areshidze calls the “theologically transformative presuppositions”) of Rawlsian liberalism, they, too, fail to consider how religious truths can be “lost in translation” as they are forced to articulate their views within “post-secular” societies. As an example of such translation issues, Areshidze examines Catholic reasons for supporting religious freedom, arguing that despite some overlap with secular justifications these reasons nevertheless are not exhausted by them.

Parties and partisanship have been subject of empirical research for decades. Recently, partisanship also became an increasingly important topic in normative political theory. A central line of research is about how partisanship can contribute to the functioning of a liberal democracy. While this is an important normative discussion in its own right, the criteria that are developed on the relationship between partisanship and liberal democracy are too unspecific to be used as benchmarks in empirical research. The article by Lise Ester Herman, “Democratic Partisanship: From Theoretical Ideal to Empirical Standard,” sets out to remedy this shortcoming. She develops a theoretical and conceptual framework that has “cohesiveness” and “respect for political pluralism” as the two main dimensions. Both dimensions are operationalized via multiple indicators whose benefit for empirical research is illustrated in the article.

Partisanship predicts a variety of political attitudes and different forms of political behavior. The article, “Policy Uptake as Political Behavior: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act,” by Amy E. Lerman, Meredith L. Sadin, and Samuel Trachtman goes beyond existing research on partisanship by asking whether partisanship also explains policy uptake. Focusing on the United States, they examine whether Republicans and Democrats show different behavior in relation to Obamacare. The empirical analysis has two components. First, using longitudinal observational data, the authors show that Democrats are more likely to enroll in an insurance plan than Republicans. Second, in a large-scale field experiment, they analyze the mechanisms of policy uptake and find that the way in which Obamacare is described affects policy uptake. Altogether, the article indicates that partisanship plays an important role in U.S. politics, influencing how citizens respond to the opportunities that a policy offers.

Does the state of the economy influence voting behavior? In the article “Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey,” Andrew J. Healy, Mikael Persson, and Erik Snowberg seek to answer this question by drawing on a unique Swedish dataset linking personal income records with a representative election survey. This gives the authors the opportunity to comparatively test arguments about sociotropic voting against arguments centered on pocketbook voting. The study points to the benefits of combining both data sources because the combination offers a better assessment of the argument that the economy is the more important driving force of voting behavior. Both explanations of voting seem to be equally relevant. Moreover, the study presents new insights on the sources of bias in economic evaluations and the question of whether income changes early or late in the government's term matter more.

Kevin Duong turns to revolutionary French history as a means of extending disciplinary conversations about violence and sovereignty in his article, “The People as a Natural Disaster: Redemptive Violence in Jacobin Political Thought.” Examining the trial and execution of Louis XVI in 1792, Duong draws on both image and text to suggest that the lack of legal precedent for regicide prompts Jacobin thinkers to tie the king's execution to a new exercise of popular agency—a form of “redemptive violence” that simultaneously dissolves the social body while reconstituting it. This article thus offers an outstanding example of how careful examination of a historical event can contribute to political theorizing that is both historically sensitive while offering lessons of contemporary relevance.

Volha Charnysh and Evgeny Finkel develop an interesting and carefully crafted research design to study an under-researched question: How do mass killings affect local property transfers? In their article, “The Death Camp Eldorado: Political and Economic Effects of Mass Violence,” they choose the Treblinka death camp in Poland to study the redistribution of wealth from the Jewish victims to the population living in the vicinity, due to the exogenous placement of the death camp and absence of alternative explanations for such property transfers in this case. Charnysh and Finkel create an original historical dataset on various luxury goods, productive assets, and housing to assess economic redistribution. Their results reveal that these property transfers had a highly localized impact and led to investments in new and better homes in the vicinity of the death camp. Their research also shows that higher proximity to the death camp had a long-term political impact, as communities near Treblinka exhibited higher electoral support for the anti-Semitic party, the League of Polish Families, in the 2001 election. This study shows how an innovative research design can utilize historical data to help us to understand questions with wide-ranging implications.

This richly sourced article draws on typically overlooked historical material, including correspondence and early drafts of Perpetual Peace, to advance a novel interpretation of Kant's cosmopolitanism. Although Kant has long been known for promoting ideals of international peace, in her article, “It's Not about Race: Good Wars, Bad Wars, and the Origins of Kant's Anti-Colonialism,” Inés Valdez shows convincingly that such views must be examined alongside his claims about European international relations. From this juxtaposition emerges a new and important interpretive insight: Kant's theory of cosmopolitan right was not aimed at securing humane treatment to the distant others that Europeans sought to subjugate, but rather to securing peace within Europe. His condemnation of colonialism was thus directed at subduing the intrastate rivalry that extraterritorial possessions created among European powers, and could exist, Valdez argues, without tension alongside a hierarchical race theory.

In the letter, “A Pairwise Comparison Framework for Fast, Flexible, and Reliable Human Coding of Political Texts,” David Carlson and Jacob M. Montgomery contribute to the growing field of research on crowdsourced coding for measuring and analyzing latent concepts in political texts. They do so by combining humans’ natural ability to understand natural language with the capacity of computers to automate tasks. By automating the workflow for coding text units in a series of tasks suitable for nonexperts, their SentimentIt framework makes it convenient to measure researcher-defined characteristics via pairwise comparisons of texts using human crowd coders, which can be recombined using statistical scaling of the comparisons. They validate their platform with advertisements from U.S. Senate candidates and State Department reports on human rights.