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About the Editors

The American Political Science Review (APSR) is lead by a team of twelve co-editors from many institutions across North America:

 

  • Sharon Wright AustinProfessor of Political Science, University of Florida
  • Michelle L. Dion, Professor of Political Science and Senator William McMaster Chair in Gender and Methodology, McMaster University
  • Clarissa Rile Hayward, Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis 
  • Kelly M. Kadera, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Iowa (Current Lead Editor)
  • Celeste Montoya, Associate Professor of Political Science and Women and Gender Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder
  • Julie NovkovProfessor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Interim Dean, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, SUNY
  • Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University
  • Dara Strolovitch, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science, Yale University
  • Aili Mari Tripp, Wangari Maathai Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • Denise M. Walsh, Associate Professor of Politics and Women, Gender, and Sexuality, University of Virginia (Current Lead Editor)
  • Elisabeth Jean Wood, Crosby Professor of the Human Environment and Professor of Political Science, International and Area Studies, Yale University

Editor: Dragana Svraka

Editorial Assistants: Editorial Assistants: Carolyn Anh Dang (University of Virginia); Scovia Aweko (Purdue University); Peter Bachman (Washington University in St. Louis); Jessica Burch (Simon Fraser University); Gustavo Diaz (McMaster University); Patrick Edwards (Washington University in St. Louis); Joshua Fawcett-Weiner (University of British Columbia); Kristen Gary (University of Florida); Monica Komer (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Chase LaSpisa (University of Iowa); Connor Moran (University at Albany, SUNY); Nicholas Ottone (Yale University); Rachel O’Neal (University of Colorado, Boulder); Melissa Pavlik (Yale University); Jenna Pedersen (Washington University in St. Louis); Kathryn Schauer (University of Colorado, Boulder). 

 

 

Vision Statement by Editors

We are honored to have been selected as the American Political Science Review’s new editorial team. We thank the APSA Council and the selection committee for their confidence in our team and for their support for our vision. In entrusting the editorship of the association’s flagship journal to our diverse and all-woman team, the Council is demonstrating its commitment to promoting a wider range of voices and scholarship in the journal and the discipline. We launched our preparations at a brainstorming retreat hosted by the Santa Fe Institute in July, 2019. We are grateful to SFI for their support.

Under the leadership of Thomas König and the other members of the current editorial team, the American Political Science Review has maintained its reputation as one of the discipline’s leading journals. König and his team have published cutting-edge research about substantive political issues, questions, and problems, with a particular commitment to globalizing the content, readership, and reach of the journal.

Our team will continue—and expand upon—this trajectory. We aim to maintain and improve the quality and integrity of the American Political Science Association’s flagship journal while broadening its readership, relevance, and contributor pool. To do so, we intend to publish problem-driven scholarship that is well-conceptualized, ethically-designed, and well-executed; research on topics and by scholars the discipline has been slow to engage; and work that uses a range of methods and approaches to address both timely and timeless questions about power and governance that are central to the study of politics everywhere. We are also committed to responding to the concerns of many colleagues — including women, people of color, scholars of race, gender, and sexuality, and scholars who employ qualitative methods — who feel that the APSR has been unreceptive to them and to their work. At the same time, we recognize that any team, no matter how diverse, must be proactive if it is to meet the challenge of representing, in the pages of a single journal, the diversity of subfields, geographic areas of study, identities, methods, and approaches that are encompassed by a broad and pluralistic discipline like political science.

 

To achieve these goals, our editorial vision emphasizes six principles.

 

Our first principle is editorial transparency. Our decision-making processes will aim to meet the highest standards of transparency with respect to key editorial issues. We will collect and make available data about our workflow as well as about the demographic composition of our reviewer pool, readership, and submitting and published authors. We will also regularly address questions about these issues in an online “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQ).

Our second key principle, checks and balances in editorial decision-making, will guide several practices intended to ensure that the journal publishes the highest-quality original work. We are committed to respectful communication among editors, reviewers, and authors, and to ensuring that our review process provides for thoughtful consideration of work that falls outside of traditional or mainstream scholarship. Editors will employ a common rubric to guide decisions about desk rejections and will employ pre-publication checks and safeguards to ensure the originality and validity of all published work. We will also provide a straightforward appeal process to address authors’ concerns about editorial decisions. 

Our third principle is a commitment to research ethics. We will institute new measures to ensure that all work we publish is based on ethically conducted research. Upon submission, authors will be required to provide a reasoned justification of the ethical considerations and procedures informing their research.

Fourth, we will pursue substantive, representational, and methodological diversity. We are committed to increasing the range of research topics published in the journal, since we believe a critical marker of excellence in a political science journal with a global audience is its engagement with the fundamental, foundational, and constitutive roles of, inter alia, race, class, gender, and sexuality in structuring power, politics, and policy. Our commitment to substantive diversity extends to a commitment to diversify the subfields, geographic foci, and methodological approaches represented in the APSR. We believe that by using the journal’s full page allocation, we can broaden the range of topics it addresses without sacrificing attention to the sorts of work that it has traditionally published. We also aim to increase the diversity of submissions, authors, reviewers, and citations along lines including race, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and type of institution.

Active engagement with the APSA membership, our fifth principle, will help us increase representational and substantive diversity and will also help us to connect with scholars, evaluate concerns, and promote the journal. Team members will attend a wide variety of research section and caucus meetings at the APSA’s annual meeting and will hold an annual meet-the-editors session at the conference. We will also attend regional conferences and as many field and subfield conferences as we can in efforts to invite engagement with the journal and to the extent possible, demystify the publication process.

Our sixth principle, modernizing communications and expanding outreach to broad audiences, follows from the fifth. We intend to work with APSA and Cambridge University Press to reach new readers and raise the visibility of research published in the APSR through multiple forms of communication. We plan to follow other journals’ successful leveraging of social media by adding Twitter and Facebook accounts, facilitating blog posts featuring our authors’ research, and providing ungated early access to articles. We applaud the APSR’s recent adoption of FirstView and will pursue the various kinds of promotion opportunities this provides. 

We intend to handle the responsibilities and challenges of the APSR editorship with equal parts meticulousness and efficiency. We welcome suggestions and feedback from our colleagues, both now and throughout the course of our editorial term. Our success will depend on the active engagement and contributions of scholars across subfields and approaches as we forge a partnership with the discipline to create a leading journal we all want to read.

 

Meet the Editors

Our editorial team is unprecedented in many ways. Although many political science journals — including the APSR — have had all-male editorial teams, few have had all-woman teams; nor have many had teams with the breadth of experience and expertise encompassed by ours. Seven members of our team have served as lead or associate editors of political science journals, and collectively, we have served on the editorial boards of more than forty journals, including the APSR. Our methodological expertise ranges from GIS/geospatial analysis and formal models to participant observation, archival and historical research, and life history interviews. Team members have published work using quantitative methods such as experiments, large-scale social media analysis, and cross-national data analysis, as well as work that uses small-n cross-regional analysis, ethnography, and poststructural methods such as deconstruction. We also bring expertise in every subfield of the discipline, in nearly every region of the globe (including two regional experts in African politics), and in wide-ranging domains of US politics. And we bring substantive strengths in the domestic and international politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—areas that have been traditionally underrepresented, both among the editors and in the pages of the APSR.

In addition to our substantive and methodological breadth and expertise, our team is also diverse along lines of race, ethnicity, and sexuality. In a context of growing evidence of and concerns about the under-representation of women in submissions to the journal and in authorship of APSR articles as well as about structural biases against the publication of scholarship about race, gender, and sexuality, the APSA’s selection of our team sends a strong signal about the association leadership’s commitment to structural and cultural changes at the journal and in the discipline more generally. We take seriously what we understand to be a mandate to effect these changes. As scholars who engage these topics in our research and who have also worked to increase equity and diversity in the profession and at our own institutions, we believe our team is particularly well-positioned to advance these goals.

 

Sharon Wright Austin is Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her most recent book is The Caribbeanization of Black Politics: Race, Group Consciousness, and Political Participation in America (SUNY 2018), and she is currently editing a book entitled Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors.

Michelle L. Dion, Professor of Political Science and Senator William McMaster Chair in Gender and Methodology at McMaster University (Canada), studies sexuality, attitudes, and social policy, as well as diversity, methodology, and the profession. She is the author of a book and numerous articles and has been recognized with multiple awards for her research and for her work on the advancement of women.

Clarissa Rile Hayward, Professor of Political Science at Washington University, studies power, democracy, identity, and American urban politics. Her most recent book is the award-winning How Americans Make Race (Cambridge University Press 2013), and she has served as co-editor of Political Research Quarterly

Kelly M. Kadera is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. Her award-winning research examines international conflict, gendered violence, and gender in academia. She won the Northcutt Award (2016) for her work mentoring junior female scholars of international relations. She is a former co-editor and associate editor of International Studies Review.

Celeste Montoya is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is author of From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combating Violence against Women (Oxford University Press 2013) and coeditor of Gendered Mobilizations and Intersectional Challenges (ECPR Press 2019). She previously served as an editor for Politics, Groups, and Identities and as an associate editor for Politics & Gender.

Julie Novkov is Professor of Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Interim Dean, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author and co-editor of several books and journal articles, including the award-winning Racial Union, and served as president of the Western Political Science Association in 2016-17.

Valeria Sinclair-Chapman is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. She is the co-author of the award-winning Countervailing Forces in African-American Political Activism, 1973-1994 (Cambridge University Press 2006) as well as many journal articles and book chapters, and she is co-lead editor of Politics, Groups, and Identities

Dara Strolovitch, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies and Political Science at Yale University, is the author of the award-winning Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics (Chicago 2007), as well as many journal articles and book chapters, and she was a founding Associate Editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics

Aili Mari Tripp, Wangari Maathai Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studies African politics, including North Africa, and gender and politics. The author of numerous award-winning books, she has been president of the African Studies Association, vice president of APSA, and co-editor of Politics & Gender.

Denise M. Walsh, Associate Professor of Politics and Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia, does cross-regional, comparative research on democratic transitions, women’s rights, and multiculturalism. She is the author of Women’s Rights in Democratizing States (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and co-editor of five multi-article journal symposiums.

Elisabeth Wood is Crosby Professor of the Human Environment and Professor of Political Science, International and Area Studies at Yale University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on comparative politics, political violence, and qualitative methods. She has served on editorial boards for World Politics, Politics and Society, and the American Political Science Review.