Abstract
It is an honor and a privilege to serve as the newest editorial team for the journal Political Research Quarterly (PRQ). We thank the Western Political Science Association (WPSA) Search Committee for recommending us and the WPSA Executive Council for approving our editorial tenure.
In this brief note, we highlight the continuity and changes associated with our editorship of PRQ. Specifically, we begin with a brief summary of what remains the same, what has changed, our editorial philosophy, and a discussion of our editorial model.
We are very grateful to have inherited a journal whose house was already in order. Not only was PRQ running on all cylinders when the previous editors turned the reins over to us, but they were very helpful in guiding us through the editorial transition. We had a bevy of questions and they were all answered. Furthermore, the technical transition was without too many hiccups, and this is a tribute to the willingness of our predecessors as well as the good folks at SAGE to make sure we had everything we needed to keep the management of the journal running smoothly. Jeanette, Clarissa, James, and Jake, thank you; we intend to extend the same assistance to the team that proceeds us.
Regarding continuity, most of the electronic interface, that is, PRQ’s Web presence, has remained the same. Now that PRQ is managed at Texas Tech University, the contact email address is
As for new policies, there are a handful that PRQ supporters should be aware of. Foremost, we are adamant about the importance of responsiveness. We cannot speak for other editorial teams, but in our case, we are insistent about having all author and reviewer inquiries answered in a timely manner. To this end, it should be expected that you will hear from us no later than two days, and usually within twenty-four hours. All of us are of course scholars in addition to editors, and thus we are acutely aware of the frustration associated with waiting to hear back from an editor about the status of a manuscript, whether it is appropriate to review a certain manuscript, a request for additional time to complete a revision/review, and so on. As for the PRQ home page, we have chosen to have more content available to readers, including archived annual reports, archived lists of outstanding reviewers, and a new section to the journal called TRENDS, which debuts in this issue. We have added this component to the journal to draw attention to work that appears particularly novel in speaking to the dynamics of contemporary political phenomena. Finally, upon accepting our editorship, we made the decision to almost completely overhaul the editorial advisory board, a fairly typical practice when a journal changes editorial hands. We believe our editorial board is an accurate reflection of the scholars who publish and review for PRQ, in terms of methodological, substantive, and demographic diversity.
During lunch with the previous managing editor, Jake Mauslein, he averred to one of us that “journals are a lifeblood of our discipline.” We could not agree more. Journals are the primary conduit for academicians/scholars to persist in a perpetual conversation about how the political world works. We take our editorship very seriously because authors have important things to say and we want to make sure that the work published in PRQ is a leader among the myriad political conversations advanced by social scientists of all stripes. To this end, we believe an optimal means to improve the quality of published work is through an editorial model with informational economies of scale. Admittedly, we have embraced the editorial model implemented at The Journal of Politics (JOP), which employs a division of editorial labor based on academic specialization. As a generalist journal, PRQ is well served by having a team of editors with expertise in the subfields that draw the greatest number of submissions. Not only does this editorial model speed up the initial processing of manuscripts, it also allows each editor to be appropriately involved throughout the duration of the review process with respect to those manuscripts that reside in the editor’s field of expertise.
We are excited to have taken on this service and we greatly value the production of high-quality research. We aim to handle every manuscript with the attention it deserves, regardless of what the final decision might be, and in turn, we hope that authors will send us their best work.