Perspectives on Politics

Perspectives on Politics is one of the leading journals in the academic field of political science. It is published by the [http://apsanet.org American Political Science Association] via Cambridge University Press. The impetus for the creation of this relatively new journal (its first issue was published in March 2003) came from an increasingly contentious debate amongst academics within the field of political science that related to the growth of statistical and quantitative methodologies and their increasing ubiquity in the leading journals in the field.

Many scholars inveighed against the increasing domination of articles based on statistical analysis in the main political science journals and the perception that those who did not use statistical methodology in their own work were being denied the opportunity to publish in the leading journals. This, of course, is potentially fatal to the careers of aspiring academics, whose dreams of secure tenured full-time faculty positions are dependent upon having their work published. The leading proponents of the "anti-quantitative view" anonymously joined forces under the pseudonymous group "Perestroika". The name, of course, was taken from the Russian word for restructuring, famously one of the important policy goals of Mikhail Gorbachev upon his ascension to the presidency of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.

What the Perestroikans sought was a restructuring of the nature of the academic discipline, with more tolerance of and room for methodological approaches to the study of political science that were non-quantitative and non-statistical in nature. Post-modernism, critical theory, and qualitative methods were just some of the methods that were rarely seen in the leading political science journals.

Responding to Perestroikan concerns, the American Political Science Association--the largest professional association of political scientists in the world--decided to restructure its own prominent journal, the American Political Science Review (APSR), while establishing a completely new journal--"Perspectives in Politics"--which would be more inclusive and aim to publish articles on work with a much broader methodological approaches to the analysis of issues in political science. In addition, the book reviews section of the APSR was eliminated and incorporated into the new Perspectives on Politics.

The journal's first editory, Jennifer Hochschild addressed the goals of the new journal in the inaugural editor's introduction in the March 2003 issue:

Articles in Perspectives aim to clarify the political significance of accumulated research regarding a particular area of the world, an important policy problem, a deep normative conflict, or a significant institution or process; they may also demonstrate the insights that accrue from assessing politics from a distinctive viewpoint, method, or type of evidence. In order to bring together allreaders interested in the study of politics, articles in Perspectives need to be engagingly and clearly written with a minimum of technical language. They must meet the highest standards ofscholarship and thought.