APSA Announces the New Editorial Team for the American Political Science Review

The American Political Science Association is delighted to announce a new editorial team to lead the American Political Science Review (APSR), starting June 1, 2020.  The APSA Council selected a team co-led by twelve distinguished political scientists: Sharon Wright Austin, University of Florida, Michelle L. Dion, McMaster University, Celeste Montoya, University of Colorado, Boulder, Clarissa Rile Hayward, Washington University in St. Louis, Kelly M. Kadera, University of Iowa, Julie Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Purdue University, Dara Strolovitch, Princeton University, Aili Mari Tripp, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Denise M. Walsh, University of Virginia, S. Laurel Weldon, Simon Fraser University, and Elisabeth Jean Wood, Yale University.

Statement from the editors:

We are honored to have been selected as the American Political Science Review’s new editorial team. We thank the APSA Council and the selection committee for their confidence in our team and for their support for our vision. In entrusting the editorship of the association’s flagship journal to our diverse and all-woman team, the Council is demonstrating its commitment to promoting a wider range of voices and scholarship in the journal and the discipline.

Under the leadership of Thomas König and the other members of the current editorial team, the American Political Science Review has maintained its reputation as one of the discipline’s leading journals. König and his team have published cutting-edge research about substantive political issues, questions, and problems, with a particular commitment to globalizing the content, readership, and reach of the journal.

Our team will continue—and expand upon—this trajectory. We aim to maintain and improve the quality and integrity of the American Political Science Association’s flagship journal while broadening its readership, relevance, and contributor pool. To do so, we intend to publish problem-driven scholarship that is well-conceptualized, ethically-designed, and well-executed; research on topics and by scholars the discipline has been slow to engage; and work that uses a range of methods and approaches to address both timely and timeless questions about power and governance that are central to the study of politics everywhere.

Current APSA President, Rogers Smith of the University of Pennsylvania also noted, “The members of the new, innovatively structured APSR editorial team bring a wealth of editorial experience to the vital task of publishing the most intellectually rigorous and substantively significant scholarship in political science, drawn from all parts of our diverse discipline.  Recognizing that the APSR is a collective endeavor of the entire profession, APSA will now also provide a heightened level of administrative support, enabling more scholars from a wider range of institutions to contribute to the APSR’s editorial management.  In the same spirit, by contributing our reviewing services and our best work to the APSR, all of us in political science can aid the new team and our discipline to build on past accomplishments and achieve a still more stellar and impactful flagship journal.”

APSA Executive Director, Steven Rathgeb Smith also stated that “The APSR is the flagship journal of the APSA and plays a central role in the publication of cutting-edge research on politics and governance around the world. The outstanding new editorial team will continue the tradition of editorial excellence at APSR and ensure that the journal will continue to publish top-notch, discipline-defining research. Moreover, the new editorial model will offer important opportunities for the journal to be responsive to emergent trends in academic publishing and the diversity of the political science discipline.”.

The new team’s term begins on June 1, 2020 and concludes on May 31, 2024.  To read the full vision statement of the new editorial team as well as more information on the co-editors, please visit this page

11 Comments

  1. Congratulations to the new team1 An exciting new page in the history of our association and profession.

  2. Bravo to the new Editorial Team! I am delighted to see the APSR move in such a positive, innovative direction. All good wishes for a very successful, creative, inclusive approach to promoting and disseminating good political science research.

  3. “Diverse”?

    You’re torturing language in ways Orwell could never have dreamed of.

  4. It is unethical to select an editorial team on the basis of race, gender, age, or sexuality. I wish them well, but this is a bad day for science.

  5. Inclusivity and diversity mean: all women, ten in twelve white?
    I don’t care about identity quotas – alas, it’s a very bad idea – but at least spare us the woke terminology.

  6. Just about as diverse (intellectually and otherwise) as we were in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

  7. There are ten white women and two black women on this board.

    That is not diverse, at all. It is, in fact, an Orwellian travesty of the meaning of the word “diverse.” You might as well have had ten white men and two token non-whites and made the same claim.

    For shame.

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