Dear readers and contributors:
A year after the inaugural issue of Political Science Research and Methods (PSRM), we want to take the opportunity to take stock of our achievements by way of introducing this 4th issue, which marks the first anniversary of PSRM.
The 4th annual conference of the European Political Science Association (EPSA) just took place in Edinburgh and the new president, Gerald Schneider (University of Konstanz), delivered the inspiring and thought provoking address that opens this issue. He argued that European political scientists might be closing the gap in performance relative to their North American counterparts. We at PSRM hope to contribute to this encouraging development by providing an outlet for systematic social science in a European context for researchers from all over the world.
To that end, over the last year more than 200 original manuscripts have been submitted to, and reviewed by, PSRM. Researchers from different parts of the world—with major influxes from the United States (~45 percent), the UK and Germany (~30 percent)—and most major subfields (Political Behavior 30 percent, International Relations and International Political Economy 20 percent, Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Economy 15 percent, Quantitative Methods 13 percent and Formal Modeling 8 percent) have sent us work. We do our best to turn manuscripts around quickly (less than 2 months from submission to first decision on average). Clearly, getting a new journal off the ground requires concerted action from the contributors, reviewers, the editorial team and board, the association and the publisher. We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in this process very warmly.
PSRM is one of the few journals in the social sciences with a replication policy that does not just require the authors to upload their replication files to our dataverse prior to publication—which has become the standard for reputable journals. We also only issue acceptances conditional on the successful replication of all empirical results in the manuscript. Thus far our experience with the replication process has been very positive, as has the feedback received from the authors. We want to thank Seyedbabak Rezaeedaryakenari (a PhD candidate at Arizona State University), who has set up and implemented a smooth replication process for the journal.
In addition to the EPSA presidential address, this issue presents research from different fields, employing a variety of empirical and formal approaches to political science and political economy. The article by Schoonvelde uses a multi-level approach to study the institutional effects on political learning and knowledge, while Kung employs a regression discontinuity design to explore the relationship between career incentives and political outcomes. We also want to turn your attention to three articles featuring formal models in political science and political economy. The articles by Duggan, Patty and Penn, and Popa exemplify how formal modeling can be used to explain political phenomena such as corruption and its redistributive effects (Popa), networked sequential policy making (Patty/Penn) and to apply familiar folk theorem ideas to particular political situations such as repeated elections (Duggan).
This issue closes with two research notes on the determinants of electoral turnout. Persson uses a survey experiment to re-examine the Hawthorne effect with data from the Swedish Election Study, and Enos and Fowler use a large-scale field experiment to analyze the relationship between pivotality and turnout.
We hope you enjoy reading these articles that mark the first year anniversary of PSRM, and expect to see your own research submitted to us shortly.
On behalf of our entire team,
