We are the new editorial team of Politics: three early career scholars, representing three different areas of expertise, presenting one unified vision for this flagship Political Studies Association journal. We officially take over from 1 September, but we have begun working behind the scenes already.
Politics 2015 editorial addressed the question of diversity in the discipline of politics and international studies. As editors of a pluralist, generalist journal we have been concerned to foster diversity – of approaches, authors and reviewers. We hope the articles we have published over the past 3 years demonstrate that we want to champion a diverse range of approaches, methods and cases. However, like many scholars, we share a concern about the diversity of authors. Politics and international studies have been shown to suffer a significant gender gap in publishing. As such, we wanted to address this as a first step to increasing the diversity of the journal. At the end of 2014 we examined the statistics we had on this. Overall we found that Politics record is roughly comparable with the diversity of the discipline. However, this does not mean we can be complacent. One of the problems we identified was that the ScholarOne manuscript system used by Politics and many other journals does not collect diversity data as a matter of course. As such we have introduced a new question for authors and reviewers so that we can collect and monitor information about the gender of our authors and reviewers. We hope this is the first step in improving diversity in Politics.
You can read the full editorial here
