Welcome to the inaugural issue of Political Science Research and Methods (PSRM). It is hard to believe that this journal, and indeed the European Political Science Association (EPSA) that sponsors it, have come so far so fast. Along with the need for an association devoted to the best that social science has to offer political science and related fields came the need for a high-quality journal to match this ambition. PSRM strives to become a top-tier outlet for the best quantitative, formal, positivist and rigorous work in the discipline, and for research that lies at the substantive intersection of politics and economics and other cognate fields. Our first issue represents a microcosm of what we intend this journal to become.
The articles in the first issue therefore cover a wide range of substantial subfields and methodological approaches to political and social sciences. The research presented in this issue ranges from purely formal theoretical work applied to crisis bargaining (Fey, Meirowitz and Ramsay) to empirical investigation of economic voting (Dassonneville and Lewis-Beck) and political depolarization in public opinion (Munzert and Bauer), as well as causal inference methods employed to identify the effects of e-voting on perception (Alvarez, Levin, Pomares and Leiras) and election reforms on turnout (Gerber, Huber and Hill). This first issue also features quantitative text analysis tools used to analyze the impact of leaders’ rhetorical signals (Baturo and Mikhaylov) and research that combines theoretical modeling with spatial econometric analysis of policy diffusion (Ward and John).
These articles represent our goals for diversity in terms of statistical methods and formal theory, work on politics and interdisciplinary research in political economy, and other fields across disciplinary borders in the social sciences. They demonstrate the type of rigorous work we hope to continue sharing from researchers in Europe, the United States and across the globe.
Future issues of the journal will contain a similar mix of social science approaches to a variety of substantive topics in politics and political economy. We also expect to occasionally publish special issues devoted to particular methodologies or substantive areas. While the journal is agnostic about the substantive area of investigation, we are quite serious about maintaining high standards for method and theory. We also endeavor to shorten review times and avoid delaying publication with endless revisions. In essence, we want this journal to both maintain a high status in the discipline and serve as a means of timely scholarly communication. We recognize this is a high standard for a new journal, but we believe that the focused efforts of the scholarly community associated with the EPSA can deliver these types of manuscripts to its flagship journal.
We could not have done this without the assistance and support of so many people, especially the “troika” responsible for the foundation of the EPSA, who came up with the idea for this new publication outlet—Ken Benoit, Raymond Duch and Thomas Pluemper. We are also very grateful to the EPSA publications committee, who selected our proposal for editorship of this new journal. We would like to thank Patrick McCartan at Cambridge University Press (CUP) for seeing the possibilities associated with this journal and the team at CUP that supports the publication process. We thank our Associate Editors, Ken Benoit, Simon Hug and Francesco Squintani, for their hard work thus far. We owe a special thanks to our Editorial Board members, who have been so good about reviewing many of our initial submissions in such a timely fashion. We would also like to give a big thank you to Helen Neal for her tireless administrative support. We would like to thank the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick and particularly its head of department, Abhinay Muthoo, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa for their support.
We hope that the articles in this first issue of PSRM stimulate you. We also expect to see your own papers submitted to PSRM shortly.
On behalf of our entire team,
Cameron G. Thies Vera E. Troeger
University of Iowa University of Warwick
