Rethink APSR Review Policy.

APSA president Robert Jervis has written to the Perestroika forum avowing his support for the goal of expanding the range of articles carried by the APSR. He further noted that APSA's strategic planning committee and the incoming editor, Lee Sigelman, also embrace this goal. But his letter suggests that the self-selection of contributors was the main reason for the APSR's unbalanced contents and, other than the good intentions of all concerned, he offered no plans for structural change in the journal. I am grateful that Professor Jervis shares some of the goals of the Perestroika forum, but I ... take issue with some of his points and urge a more concrete and active program of change.

The contention that APSA's skewed publication of articles is entirely a product of self-selection is not persuasive. If scholars in some fields have stopped sending manuscripts, it is because they perceived a prior bias against their work in the Review's editorial policy. Professor Richard Betts outlined most of the problems with the APSR to the APSA Publications Committee in 1991 in a memo that has circulated via the Perestroika forum. If the APSR's editorial staff were not biased in favor of certain forms of research, how does one explain that the staff has done nothing to remedy the situation in the nine years since? My purpose here is not to rebuke those responsible for past mistakes, but to foster an appreciation of the need for structural reform, and not merely a statement of good intentions in the present.

I am further concerned that Professor Jervis's description of an alternative future policy for the APSR, which echoes the views of many contributors to the Perestroika forum, may actually serve to sustain the journal's current vices. Several people have pointed to a "general interest" doctrine as a praiseworthy alternative to current policy, i.e., each article should be of general interest to political scientists in different fields. In addition to ideological biases, however, it is the selective implementation of just such a general interest doctrine that accounts for much of the APSR's de facto discrimination against soft-science research. Let me explain my reasoning.

I can imagine only two possible editorial policies for the journal.

Policy #1

To publish the best research in any field of political science. This policy would require that every manuscript go exclusively to referees in the same field as the author An article on Japanese politics would go to three experts on Japanese politics, a quantitative study of American politics would go to three scholars doing that type of work, and so forth.

Policy #2