Expansion of Content

In 2020 the editors and APSA negotiated an expansion of the page budget per issue from 296 pages to 325. For 2021 this was further expanded to 348 pages. This additional space has been devoted to articles and reflections. When we first started editing the journal we allocated 148 pages to both the articles and reflections, and 148 to book reviews. As of 2021 we have expanded the front section of the journal to 200 pages, an increase of over 25%.

Thematic Grouping of Articles

Following the success of our calls for papers on “Trump: Causes and Consequences”Footnote ³ and “Celebrity and Politics,”Footnote ⁴ we issued two calls for papers this year in response to the momentous events of our times. The first of these was on “Pandemic Poli-tics.” Footnote ⁵ The call closed on October 1, 2020. The response was excellent—we received over 138 submissions and have so far accepted six articles. Several others received “revise and resub-mit” decisions and are still under review. The first of the accepted articles has already appeared on FirstView.Footnote ⁶ If all goes well, we will publish this material in Volume 20, Issue 1 (2022). We will feature a selection of these papers in our sponsored panels at the APSA Annual Meeting this fall.

The second call for papers concerned the “Blacks Lives Mat-ter” movement and asked potential authors to explore the state of BLM, its impact, and potential ramifications. We developed this call on the initiative of one of the members of our editorial board, Christopher Sebastian Parker of the University of Washington, who will serve as guest editor on this issue.Footnote ⁷ To date we have received only a few submissions, but consistent with past experience we expect to receive a large number of manuscripts closer to the deadline of May 31, 2021.

To date, every issue we have assembled has grouped individual papers together in special thematic sections. We feel that the grouping of kindred material helps to give readers a sense of the state of research on important issues of concern to the discipline and also helps to bring together work that is geographically and methodologically diverse, thus promoting disciplinary and regional pluralism. The special sections for Volume 18 (2020) are summarized in table 2 with links to their tables of contents.

Table 2

Special Sections in Volume 18 (2020)

In 2021 we have two additional special sections planned. For 19(2) we have prepared a special section on “The Politics of Immigration.” And in 19(3) we plan to group together several articles that make use of “Comparative Historical Analysis.”

From the Editors

Until this year, we followed a standard procedure of authoring the introductory essays to each issue ourselves. We changed that this year. For the “Celebrity and Politics” issue (18[1]), the guest editor, Samantha Majic of John Jay College, wrote an expansive introduction to the selection of articles that she curated for us. And for issue 18(4) we invited Joan Tronto, a member of the editorial board, to comment on the content of the “Moving Beyond the Glass Ceiling?” special section because of her expertise in this area. We hope to continue this practice periodically in the future.

Publicity Strategies

Embargo Dates: We continue to use embargo dates for every publication on FirstView, which is how every article is now published. Authors of manuscripts and reflections are notified of their upcoming publication date about 10–14 days prior. Coordinated release strategies with our authors and with Cambridge Core helps our material reach the broadest possible audiences on social media.

Twitter: Our Twitter followership (@PoPpublicsphere) has grown dramatically. We began with just over 1,000 followers in 2017, which grew to 2,028 followers in Jan 2019, and now stands at a whopping 5,220 as of March 2021. Our Twitter strategy is to tweet about all FirstView publications, with abstracts and tables/figures where applicable, to include authors’ Twitter handles in those tweets when possible, and to retweet relevant tweets about any of our published material (accessed through the Altmetric scores available on Cambridge Core).

Facebook: Our Facebook page now has 651 total likes and 704 total followers. The post about an article with the highest estimated reach in 2020 (11/10/2020), came when 2,113 Facebook users viewed our post about David Art’s Reflection, “The Myth of Global Populism."Footnote ⁸ However, a June 11, 2020 post alerting political scientists of the need to ensure that their publishers were sending a review copy of their recent book publications to our offices reached an estimated 8,177 users.

Dataverse

A total of 93 datasets have published on our Dataverse page, as of January 2021.Footnote ⁹ This includes 635 individual files (read. me files, replication files, datasets, etc.). Per a suggestion by board member Reşat Bayer at our 2019 APSA meeting, authors of work published in Perspectives prior to Volume 17, which also presented statistical evidence, were contacted in order to offer them the opportunity to upload replication files to our page. Thus far, one scholar added their replication files to our Dataverse page and, in three other cases, links to replication files already hosted elsewhere were added to publication pages on Cambridge Core.

Number of Submissions

The number of submissions expanded substantially this year (see table 3). We received 571 new and 164 revised manuscripts. Both the individual and total numbers represent new highs for the journal. Our early fears that the pandemic would slow down academic productivity proved to be exaggerated. A part of this increase was the call for “Pandemic Politics,” which brought in a substantial number of submissions which we might well not have seen in its absence. Still, without the call, the total would have exceeded last year by almost 70 submissions.

Table 3

Manuscript Submissions per Year

We were asked by the leadership of APSA to push for the internationalization of the journal and its content. This year for the first time the number of submissions from outside the United States almost equaled that from within (see table 4).

Table 4

Number of Manuscripts Received Based on the Location of the Corresponding Author (based on available data)

We continue to publish a substantial number of authors based outside the United States. In Volume 18 (2020), 27.1% of the authors were employed by universities outside the United States. This was the highest percentage achieved to date, a slight increase from the previous high—Volume 16 (2018)—when the figure was 26.8%.Footnote ¹⁰ We suspect that the difference in the rates of submission and acceptance is a function of the lesser degree of familiarity of some international colleagues with the conventions of publication in English language journals. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic we were unable to participate in panels devoted to publishing at international conferences. Scheduled talks at the Wissentschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) and the World Meeting of the International Council for Central and East European Studies in Montreal were cancelled.

Processing of Submissions

Despite the pandemic we continue to reduce the time it takes for authors to get the initial decision from us (see table 5). The average time is just over a month, but the time is longer for manuscripts sent for external review. This year we declined to review a larger number of manuscripts because of the call for papers (see below), and we believe this explains a good part of the substantial reduction in time to first decision.

Table 5

Average Number of Days in Review Process

Editorial Decisions

In table 6 we present data on our editorial decisions for the first round of review in 2020. The number of manuscripts that we declined without external review (DNER) increased five percent this year, 60.9% from 55.8% in 2019. This was a product of the call for papers on “Pandemic Politics.” Because of the large number of submissions in response to the call, and limited space for publication (one issue), we were very selective in what we sent out for review. Of the 138 submissions that responded to the call we only sent 38 for external review. When these are subtracted from the table below the DNER rate is 56.8%, little different from the previous year (55.8). Of the 210 submissions that went out for external review (up from 151 last year), only 39% (13.6% of the total submissions) were asked to revise their work for possible publication. The vast majority of these decisions were major revisions. There were three manuscripts that were conditionally accepted on the first round. As in the past these were either originally article submissions which were rejected but were then modified with the guidance of the editors into reflection essays or the publication of the APSA presidential address. No article submission to the journal was accepted on the first-round last year, and for a substantial number of papers, two rounds of revision were required.

Table 6

First Round Editorial Decisions 2020

A revision decision from the editors does not automatically translate into publication. Six out of the 70 resubmissions by authors were rejected on the second round (8.6%). We accepted 67 articles and reflections last year, up from 33 in 2019, and 40 in 2018. We also have more space for publications now.

Table 7 compares this year to the previous six. As noted above we consider the uptick in “No External Review” decisions to be an artifact of the space concerns of doing a special issue out of a call for papers. Even with this anomaly, the rate is still below that of the previous editorial team.

Table 7

Outcome of First Round of the Review Process, 2014–20 (percentage)

Nothing we do would be possible without the support of external reviewers. And this year we know that our colleagues faced a number of challenges that made providing this service more difficult than normal. We salute our reviewers for extraordinary effort in difficult circumstances. While the number of reviewers who declined to review increased in 2020, from 438 to 568, we still received 941 completed reviews for front-end manuscripts. Furthermore, of the reviews we received, about 60% of them were completed on-time. We are grateful to those who wrote reviews for sharing their time and expertise. We also thank those who, despite the personal or professional obligations that kept them from writing a review, recommended others who could replace them. These thoughtful suggestions also helped to facilitate our work.

Journal Impact

Table 8 reports the journal’s impact and relative standing in the discipline for the last seven years.

Table 8

Journal Impact Factor, 2013–19

The Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports produce both two-year and five-year impact factors. The two-year impact factor (JIF2) continues to show recovery from its substantial decline in 2017. Our JIF2 increased from 2.326 to 2.398 from 2018 to 2019, leading to a slight drop in our disciplinary ranking from 39th to 41st. Our five-year impact factor registered a decline to 3.407, bringing a further decline in our rank in the discipline.

The JIF2 rankings for 2019 still reflect one year of material acquired by the Indiana team (2017). This year’s ratings include the first year of material for which the Florida team was responsible for acquisition (2018). Next year’s scores will be the first based solely on our work.Footnote ¹¹

The Book Review Section

Perspectives on Politics continues to serve as the book review of record for the discipline. Table 9 details the types and numbers of book reviews published in 2020 (including conventional single, double, and triple book reviews, review essays, critical dialogues and review symposia). The total number of books reviewed across all these formats was 368. This number exceeds the total number of published items in the table below because some of the review formats involve multiple books.

Table 9

Book Reviews Published in Volume 18 (2020)

Despite the challenges of producing the Book Review section during a plague year, 2020 (Vol. 18) has nevertheless again been a very real success for this side of the journal. The total number of books reviewed (368) was in line with our first two years (which featured 369 and 366 books, respectively). We are very proud of that number, especially under the circumstances described above. As usual, the editorial assistants were indispensable to the success of this half of the journal and went to truly extraordinary lengths to make sure there was no drop-off in the number of reviews this year. We are also deeply grateful to all of the scholars who took time to review their colleagues’ work in the midst of a global pandemic. The journal and the discipline are indebted to you all.

As usual, the Book Review section strives to feature a wide range of special review formats, and this year was no exception. For example, we organized a symposium on Avidit Acha-rya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen’s book, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics, as well as one on Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum’s A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Review Essays featured Gary Goertz’s assessment of a number of recent books aimed at measuring peace; Alyssa Battistoni’s reading of books on “Anthropocene Politics”; Kyong-Min Son’s review of recent treatments of populism, entitled “Populism’s Challenge and the Uncertain Future of Liberal Democracy”; and Christopher Lebron’s extended review of Nicholas Bucco-la’s The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America. Finally, we had another great year of exchanges in our “Critical Dialogues” section, including those between Sheri Berman, Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson on the history of democracy; Wendy Brown and Thomas Biebricher on neoliberalism; Carles Boix, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice on the relationship between democracy and capitalism; Karen Orren, Stephen Skowronek, Andrew Karch, and Shanna Rose on the American state; John Mear-sheimer and Will Walldorf on American foreign policy; Alasia Nuti and Inés Valdez on transnational and intergenerational justice; and Murad Idris and Jennifer Pitts on comparative political theory, international law, and empire.