¹ APSA membership has held steady at around 7,000 regular members; see ‘Executive Director’s Report Tables’, PS (2008), p. 981. Corresponding figures for the UK Political Studies Association would be misleading; its rules discouraged membership by teachers in polytechnics until the 1974 revolution. Brian Barry, ‘The Study of Politics as a Vocation’, in Hayward, Jack Barry, Brian and Brown, Archie, eds, The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999), pp. 425–467 at pp. 426–7Google Scholar, identified the numbers explosion as key to the professionalization of the profession, but (re-badging polytechnics as universities apart) that explosion had probably mostly occurred by 1971. On the British profession more generally, see my ‘The British Study of Politics’, in Gamble, Andrew, Hay, Colin, Flinders, Matthew and Kenny, Michael, eds, Oxford Handbook of British Politics Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 42–55Google Scholar.

² Judging from the number of entries in JSTOR: there are ten pre-1971 publications by Lane (only six of them in political science journals) listed; there are fourteen (all political science) pre-2008 ones listed for Katzenstein.

³ Barry, , ‘The Study of Politics as a Vocation’, p. 436Google Scholar.

⁴ Sigelman, Lee, ‘The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review’, American Political Science Review, 100 (2006), 463–478CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 468; Figures 1 and 2 graphically illustrate the way ‘narrative analysis’ – case studies that he himself describes as ‘barefoot empiricism’ – predominated in the APSR’s early years, giving way to ‘quantitative analysis’ only in the mid-1950s.

⁵ In Britain, the premier academic journal, Political Studies (founded 1953), remained insistently backward-looking preferring the ‘reflective’ over ‘scientific’ modes of analysis until the coup of 1975 that installed L. J. Sharpe as editor. Ridley’s valedictory, F. F. ‘Editorial’, Political Studies, 23 (1975)Google Scholar, unpaginated, boasted of the fact.

⁶ Circa 1971, they were eight and eleven years in the offing, respectively.

⁷ The first two had both been launched only three years previously, and the latter just one.

⁸ The first would not come along until three years after BJPolS and the second not for another fifteen years after that.

⁹ The first launched simultaneously with BJPolS, the second two years later, and the third twenty years after that. Ethics had been going since 1890, but until Brian Barry assumed its editorship in 1979 it was a pretty sad spectacle.

¹⁰ The first was only five years old at the time of the birth of BJPolS, the second came almost twenty years later and the third forty-five years later.

¹¹ Millennium was founded in 1971 and the Review of International Studies in 1975. The International Studies Quarterly, which had begun in 1947 as an annotated bibliography for teaching purposes, completed its transformation into its current form in 1967. International Organization was founded in 1947 almost wholly to discuss international organizations (the UN and regional organizations especially); it did not assume its current form as a general international relations journal until Robert Keohane’s editorship beginning in 1974.

¹² Not counting the Annual Review of Political Science (2001) and Perspectives on Politics (2003), each of which has really a rather different remit.

¹³ Sigelman, , ‘The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review’, p. 206Google Scholar, Table 1.

¹⁴ Which is not terribly different from the pattern for APSR in the same period, as best one can tell from Sigelman, , ‘The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review’, p. 206Google Scholar, Table 1.

¹⁵ There is virtually no overlap in the membership of the British International Studies Association and the Political Studies Association, according to Barry, , ‘The Study of Politics as a Vocation’, p. 427Google Scholar.

¹⁶ That was the finding of the mapping of the discipline based on cross-citation rates in the various subdisciplinary volumes of the ten-volume Oxford Handbooks of Political Science, reported in Goodin, Robert E., ed.,‘The State of the Discipline, the Discipline of the State’, Oxford Handbook of Political Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 4–57Google Scholar at pp. 19, 42.

¹⁷ Indeed, they tend to see it everywhere – even where they can give no good account of the mechanisms by which it might have been produced. The locus classicus within political science is Pierson, Paul, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence and the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, 94 (2000), 251–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ Monroe, Kristen Renwick, ed., Perestroika! Methodological Pluralism, Governance and Diversity in Contemporary American Political Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Sigelman, , ‘The Coevolution of American Political Science and the American Political Science Review’, p. 466Google Scholar, Table 1.

²⁰ The two premier generalist journals – Philosophical Review and the Journal of Philosophy – are still run this way, out of the Cornell and Columbia Philosophy Departments, respectively. In living memory, Mind was edited pretty much out of the editor’s hip pocket as well.

²¹ Only 6.1 per cent of submissions used to be rejected without review, for any reason (including formatting and other purely procedural reasons). Rogowski, Ronald and Triesman, Daniel, ‘Report of the Editors of the American Political Science Review, 2007– 2008’, PS, 42 (2009), 426–428.Google Scholar, at p. 428, Table 4.

²² The ‘Report of the Editors of the American Political Science Review, 2008–2009’, tabled at the APSA Annual Meetings in Toronto in September 2009 and forthcoming in PS, reports a ‘sharp rise in summary rejections’ – 16.1 per cent in 2008–09, up from 6.1 per cent a year before. The report describes this as a ‘move urged upon us in Council discussion last year’.

²³ These are practices introduced into BJPolS by its founding editor, Brian Barry, and he carried them over into his next editorial venture; see his ‘On Editing Ethics’, Ethics, 90 (1979), 1–6, at pp. 4–6.

²⁴ Polsby, Nelson, ‘Editorial Comment: Help Wanted’, American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 199–201Google Scholar. Unsurprisingly for anyone who knew him, Polsby got himself appointed to that committee.

²⁵ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’, p. 199Google Scholar.

²⁶ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’Google Scholar.

²⁷ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’Google Scholar.

²⁸ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’Google Scholar.

²⁹ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’, pp. 199–200Google Scholar.

³⁰ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’, p. 200Google Scholar.

³¹ Polsby, , ‘Editorial Comment’Google Scholar.

³² For evidence, look down the list in Goodin, , ‘The State of the Discipline, the Discipline of the State’, p. 41Google Scholar, of ‘integrators’ of the discipline (defined as ones cited in more than half the subdisciplinary volumes of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science), and notice how many of them have edited the discipline’s major journals.

³³ The phrase is now more than two decades old, after all: see Almond, Gabriel A., ‘Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 21 (1988), 828–842Google Scholar.

³⁴ Hausman, Daniel M. and McPherson, Michael S., ‘Standards’, Economics and Philosophy, 4 (1988), 1–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 3–4.

³⁵ Of course, editors could always just collect the subscriptions themselves: but then they just become their own publisher, not importantly different from commercial publishers. In any case, the economies of scale derived from publishers doing this for more than one journal would be lost.

³⁶ Again, various more complicated arrangements might be envisaged: maybe, for example, someone could collect promising posts and submit them to a panel of scholars for anonymous assessment before they are recommended to others. But any more elaborate system of that sort is not so much replacing journals as replicating them on-line.

³⁷ Kornai, János, Maskin, Erik and Roland, Gérard, ‘Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint’, Journal of Economic Literature, 41 (2003), 1095–1136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁸ Hardin, Garrett, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 162 (1968), 1243–1248Google Scholar.

³⁹ Bikhehandani, Sushil, Hirshleifer, David and Welch, Ivo, ‘A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades’, Journal of Political Economy, 100 (1992), 992–1026.CrossRefGoogle Scholar