An Open Letter to the APSA Leadership and Members.(American Political Science Association)

As many of you are aware the American Political Science Association has recently experienced an extraordinary outpouring of frustration with the current state of the American Political Science Review, the APSA, and the profession generally. An anonymous scholar writing as "Mr. Perestroika" circulated to an extensive roster of political scientists a passionate memo asking many provocative, indeed painful, questions. Why do so many leaders of our profession not even read, much less submit, to the APSR? Why is purchase of the APSR made mandatory for membership, thus subsidizing a journal many find unsatisfactory, instead of permitting membership without the journal or with other journals? Why do the APSA Council and APSR Editorial Board seem to be chosen essentially by their predecessors? Why does the APSR and why do other prominent professional fora seem so intensively focused on technical methods, at the expense of the great, substantive political questions that actually intrigue many APSA members, as well as broader intellectual audiences?

Though some recipients may have felt uncomfortable with the anonymous authorship and the highly polemical tone of this post, nonetheless an astonishing number of scholars, from all ranks of the profession, felt impelled to announce that they, too, shared these profound dissatisfactions with the status quo. Many noted that in 1998 an APSA membership survey reportedly found that, in fact, a very large proportion of APSA members, to say nothing of scholars who have given up on APSA, were critical of the current condition of the APSR. A lively discussion ensued, in which scholars discussed whether the problems arose from the biases of APSR editors and APSA leaders, from more structural problems in the reviewing processes, or from problems in American intellectual and political life more broadly. Inevitably, people differed in their views. There has been, however, extensive agreement that whatever the sources of the problems, changes need to be made.

What changes? Many ideas have been explored in recent email discussions. These have included:

* Permitting APSA members not to purchase the APSR, but rather to choose alternative journals or none at all.

* Making the selection of the APSR Editorial Board, the APSA Council, and basic policy decisions concerning the journal and the association more open to genuine democratic decision making by the APSA membership.

* Revising the APSR reviewing process to seek both to ensure that some methodologies are not automatically vetoed and that most articles are of interest to a broad scholarly audience.

* Finding ways to encourage scholars who have given up on the APSR to submit their work to it once again.