All authors must read and adhere to the SPPQ Data Verification and Replication Policy.

Aims and Scope

State Politics & Policy Quarterly (SPPQ), peer-reviewed and published quarterly, is the premier publication outlet for original research on state politics and policy. The official publication of the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association, SPPQ publishes high quality academic studies that develop and test general hypotheses of political phenomena and policymaking by exploiting the unique advantages of the American states.

The editors seek manuscripts examining any aspect of political behavior, practices, institutions, and policy in the American states, as well as methodologies used to study these processes. The editors encourage manuscripts from a variety of methodological or theoretical approaches.  Studies that deal with other sub-national units of government in the U.S. and studies that examine the American states or local governments compared with others from around the world may also be considered for publication. 

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article* (original articles of no more than 10,000 words, and short articles of no more than 4,000 words)

* If publishing Gold Open Access, all or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.

Preparing your article for submission

SPPQ uses a double-anonymous review process and does not consider manuscripts under review elsewhere.

SPPQ considers two types of submissions: Original Articles and Short Articles.

1. Original Articles

Submissions should be no more than 10,000 words (including text, figures/tables, citations, footnotes, and references) and should include an abstract of no more than 200 words. 

2. Short Articles

Submissions should be no more than 4,000 words (including text, figures/tables, citations, footnotes, and references) and should include an abstract of no more than 200 words. Compared to Original Articles, Short Article submissions often have briefer introductions and theory sections. For instance, Short Article submissions may introduce new data sets available to the field or methodological or data questions pertinent to the study of state politics; these submissions should not only describe a new data set but also demonstrate its utility to the state politics field. Short Article submissions may also provide alternative theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and/or findings to the existing literature, albeit in a shorter, more focused manner than an Original Article submission.

The review process is the same for each type of submission. The editors review the submission for its appropriateness and quality and decide whether to desk reject it or send it out for review. Typically, 2-3 reviewers are asked to provide feedback on the submission.

To submit your manuscript, please see Submitting your materials.   

Submissions must be anonymous with all author-identifying information removed.  This includes any acknowledgements or expressions of gratitude, research funding or grant disclosures, and direct references to the author’s university or department. In addition, authors are welcome to include a reasonable number of citations to their own work, so long as they cannot be used to identify the manuscript’s author. Authors should avoid citing their own doctoral dissertations, conference papers, manuscripts in review, and forthcoming publications. In the event a manuscript is accepted for publication, any self-identifying citations or information can be added to the final version. More information on anonymising your manuscript can be found here. 

Any supplementary material (i.e., online appendices) should be submitted as a separate file (using the Supplementary Material option) at the time of submission. More information on supplementary material can be found here. 

Submissions may also include a separate title page and/or cover letter. These documents can include author contact information. 

Submissions must also include 5-10 keywords. Keywords help identify potential reviewers and should be general descriptors of the main topics of the article. More information on keywords can be found here. 

All manuscripts accepted for publication will undergo a data verification process.  Replication materials for an accepted article must be made publicly available. Publication is contingent on a successful data verification process.  Please see the the SPPQ Data Verification and Replication Policy for more information.

SPPQ follows the APSA Style Manual for Political Science. Any manuscripts accepted for publication must follow this style. We encourage authors to submit manuscripts in this format, but initial submissions adhering to other styles will be considered for review.  

An Overleaf template for State Politics & Policy Quarterly is available, which can support authors in formatting their manuscripts prior to submission. Please see below for more information.

If you have any questions, please contact Conor Dowling, Tracy Osborn, and Jonathan Winburn, editors of State Politics & Policy Quarterly, at [email protected].

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For further guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

SPPQ Data Verification and Replication Policy

All manuscripts accepted for publication will undergo a data verification process. Replication materials for an accepted article must be made publicly available. Publication is contingent on a successful data verification process. Please see below for general information on the policy and procedure. For specific instructions and guidance, please refer to the Odum Institute’s SPPQ Journal Verification Framework. 

Overview

State Politics & Politics Quarterly is committed to publishing research of all methodological approaches so that it is open and available to the scientific community. As such, all accepted articles will undergo a data verification process to ensure replication materials enable researchers to reproduce all published analyses presented in the journal. SPPQ partners with the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to verify all submitted materials are transparent, and interested researchers can replicate all published findings from the journal. 

Upon an article acceptance, authors must follow the verification and replication procedures outlined below before an article enters the production stage of the publication process.  Publication of an accepted article is contingent on successful completion of the verification and replication process. 

The following guidelines will apply to most accepted articles at SPPQ and are provided to assist authors in this process. These general guidelines apply to both quantitative and qualitative research except where there are different expectations for those types of articles. We are currently developing more specific guidelines for qualitative articles. Until those are available, authors will receive specific instructions from the editors for the verification process for their individual manuscript. While these guidelines should cover most accepted articles, the editors may make minor exceptions to the general rules or process to accommodate individual articles. 

Any exceptions or modifications to the verification policy must be approved by the SPPQ editors who retain final authority to grant any exceptions or modifications. 

General Procedure

A manuscript moves into the verification stage once the author(s) have submitted the final draft of an accepted manuscript. After submission of the final draft, the corresponding author will be responsible for providing the materials necessary to verify the results in the manuscript are reproducible. Once the verification process is successfully completed, the manuscript moves into the production phase and the verified replication content is simultaneously made publicly available on the SPPQ Dataverse. Authors may also post their verification files elsewhere, but the material must remain on the SPPQ Dataverse. 

The corresponding author starts the process by posting all verification and replication material on the SPPQ Dataverse. Please reference this checklist SPPQ Quantitative Checklist when working on the replication materials.

Replication files include the following materials:

            README File:

Every manuscript will include a plain-text file titled “readme.txt.” This file provides the names of all other files contained in the study along with a brief description of each one. The SPPQ README Guide provides more information and helpful tips.

            Analysis Dataset(s):

                        This requirement may not apply to qualitative manuscripts.

All data necessary to reproduce the results must be included in the dataverse.  Authors can choose their own data storage formats as long as the files are readily accessible to researchers in the social science community. The SPPQ Analysis Data Construction Guide provides more information and helpful tips.

In limited situations, the SPPQ editors may grant an exemption from the general requirement of publicly providing the source data. Most notably, if an author is using restricted access data or is in a situation where the data cannot be made public (e.g., the data contains confidential information), they can request a waiver from the editors. However, the editors may still ask that the data be made privately available (if that is possible) to complete the verification process, even if it not ultimately publicly posted. In these cases, the authors must provide the relevant information and procedures so that an interested researcher could apply for data access.

Additionally, the author must provide the software command files (see below) and the data construction information (see below) used to complete the analysis.

    Codebook:

                        This requirement may not apply to qualitative manuscripts.

Codebooks must include information on all variables (and only those variables) provided in the analysis datasets as well as full data citations for all data sources. The SPPQ Codebook Guide provides more information and helpful tips.

Information to Reconstruct the Analysis:

Every manuscript must contain complete information for constructing the analysis dataset(s) from the original sources of the data. For qualitative manuscripts, until more specific instructions are posted, please consult with the editors on this procedure. For quantitative manuscripts, this information provides a roadmap that interested researchers will follow to produce the results in the manuscript.  It traces the author(s)’process from collection of source data and data curation and management to the provided analysis dataset(s) in the dataverse.

Software Commands:

All manuscripts with any type of analysis dataset(s) must provide one or more files containing the software commands or code to reproduce all the analytic results reported in the manuscript. Typically, these will be plain text files. The exact format of the file contents will depend on the software used in the original analysis (i.e., Stata .do files, R command scripts, or text files). 

Regardless of the format used, comment statements should be used extensively throughout the files to explain the steps of the analysis. Examples include comments like, “The following commands recode variables X and Y in preparation for . . .,” “The following commands produce the results in Table 1,” or “The following commands create Figure 1.”

Additionally, the authors need to list and provide information on any software packages that must be installed to complete the analysis (i.e., Stata .ado files or R packages).

Authors need to provide clear and specific information about the version of the software system used to conduct the analyses (e.g., Stata 16). This requirement is critical for successful replicability of the results.

We advise authors to pay particular attention to this step in the process as the verification process goes much smoother with well-written and detailed software command files.     

Conclusion

These guidelines describe the minimum requirements for manuscript replication materials on the SPPQ Dataverse. These guidelines implement the principles of data access and research transparency (DART) to which SPPQ is a proud signatory. We encourage authors to provide as much information as possible to facilitate transparent, open, and diverse inquiries into the research published in the journal. Open, transparent research furthers efforts to establish powerful theories of political and social phenomena.

You can access the State Politics & Policy Quarterly Overleaf template here. There is a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment. Once you have completed writing your article, please use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the link for State Politics & Policy Quarterly to be directed to the journal's submission system.

LaTeX class file

You can download the LaTeX class file for State Politics & Policy Quarterly here.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated.