Aims and Scope

The British Journal of Political Science (BJPolS) is a broadly based journal aiming to cover developments across a wide range of countries and specialisms. Contributions are drawn from all fields of political science (including political theory, political behaviour, public policy and international relations), and articles from scholars in related disciplines (sociology, social psychology, economics and philosophy) appear frequently. With a reputation established over 50 years of publication, the BJPolS is widely recognised as one of the premier journals in its field.

The British Journal of Political Science is an independent journal, whose policy is set by its editorial team with the approval of its editorial board. It is committed to no methodological orthodoxy over and above the normal canons of scholarship: clear and consistent use of words, logical and mathematical validity, and the use of appropriate evidence to substantiate empirical statements. Contributions are invited in all fields of political science and political theory, except the history of political thought. Innovative and authoritative work addressed to problems of general significance to students of politics will be published whatever the period(s) or place(s) drawn upon for evidence. The Editors reserve the right to decline articles if, according to their own judgement, they are inconsistent with editorial policy.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• Letter*
• Comment
• Review Article*

* If publishing Gold Open Access, all or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access.

When submitting a piece to the Journal, authors are required to indicate the category into which their manuscript falls:

Research Articles should generally be between 4,000 and 10,000 words in length. Research articles above 10,000 words will be considered only in exceptional circumstances.

Letters are short (up to 4,000 words) and highly accessible articles making a big point shortly and succinctly.

The Journal will also on occasion publish Comments in response to BJPolS research articles or letters.

Some issues of the Journal also contain a 5,000 to 12,000 word Review Article – either a detailed discussion of a single book or a review of the state of some area of the discipline.

NOTE: All parts of the manuscript count towards the word count with the exception of the appendix and the bibliography. Please include all word counts in total. Programs like TexCount separate word count between main text, figure and table captions and footnotes. Be aware that this software notoriously underestimates word counts, struggling to properly estimate the word count produced when entering in-text references. Monterey Language Services provides a free (and fairly accurate) word count tool for counting words in PDFs.

All manuscripts submitted to the journal will be run through plagiarism detection software.

You can access the BJPolS Overleaf template here.  There is a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment.  Once you have completed writing your article, please use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the link for BJPolS to be directed to the journal's submission system.

Preparing your article for submission

Anyone preparing a manuscript for submission to the Journal is urged to follow the Journal's style guide, which covers a number of detailed points concerning footnotes, punctuation, spelling, etc. The Journal uses the in-text system for references.

At the end of an article there up to six additional sections available to authors. These should be placed before the list of references with the exception of the heading ‘Appendices’, which should appear after the references. We ask that authors make use of these headings, where appropriate, so that the important information they contain can be discovered easily by both human and machine readers.

There are four headings related to different types of materials that are additional to the text, tables and figures included in the main body of the article:

i) Under Data Availability Statement authors should provide clear information on where their replication packages are hosted (usually on the BJPolS Dataverse site: see Replication Policy section below) and how users can access them. This should include a link to the dataset and its DOI where possible. 

ii) Under Supplementary Material authors can provide clear information on where to find documents with additional analyses or figures. Such documents can be hosted on the Cambridge platform and linked to the article, though they do not need to be. Please note that any materials to hosted by Cambridge should be submitted with the article but are not typeset or copyedited. Any materials hosted elsewhere should be openly and – as far as is possible – permanently available.

iii) Finally, while we encourage authors to use the Supplementary Material option as far as possible, authors may still use the heading Appendices (which will appear at the very end of the paper, after the references) for any materials deemed sufficiently important to the reader’s understanding of the article that they should be included at the back of the typeset version of the article.

iv) Competing Interests: All authors must include a competing interests declaration in their submission. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article. Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

Authors should also use the following headings, also to be placed at the end of the article, as and when required:

• The Acknowledgments section allows authors to thank people who were helpful in research and writing of the article.
• The Funding section is used to declare whether, and if so who, supported the research. e.g. 'Support for this research was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award no. ***).

A LaTeX style file is now available for use in preparing manuscripts for the Journal, and can be obtained here.

Alternatively try writing in the BJPolS template in the online authoring tool Overleaf (http://bit.ly/2eK7D90): this helps authors adhere to style guidelines and collaborate with co-authors - more details on which can be found below.

Style guide

Contributions should be typed in double spacing, and should have a left-hand margin of at least 25mm/1 inch and a right hand margin of at least 40mm/1.5 inches. Typesize should be no smaller than 12 point. Contributors are asked to retain an exact replica themselves for use in answering copy-editor’s enquiries and correcting proofs. Authors should not attempt to hard code typesetting such as page breaks and white space in the submitted manuscript.

Accepted manuscripts must be submitted in MS Word or LaTeX. Authors using LaTeX must supply the source file as well as all additional input files required to produce the final document, such as images etc. LaTeX documents should use standard fonts and avoid using specialized packages as far as possible. (Note the Footnotes should be double-spaced using type no smaller than 10 point. They should be numbered consecutively.

References should appear in the main text itself. Each direct quotation must be accompanied by a reference containing a page number. References in should be made in the following manner:

Text:

Elster criticizes the reliance of functionalism in common Marxist explanations of technical change, and proposes alternative foundations based on intentional explanations (Elster 1983, 174). Others have argued …

Multiple references should be ordered alphabetically and separated by semicolons, i.e.

Elster criticizes the reliance of functionalism in common Marxist explanations of technical change, and proposes alternative foundations based on intentional explanations (Elster 1983, 174; Marx and Engels 2004[1848]). Others have argued …

Multiple references to the same author in the same year should be separated by a letter in alphabetical order, by their order of appearance in the list of references, i.e.

Elster criticizes the reliance of functionalism in common Marxist explanations of technical change, and proposes alternative foundations based on intentional explanations (Elster 1983a; Elster 1983b). Others have argued …

When there are three authors or more, ‘et al.’ is used in the in text citation and in the references list.

The original year of publication should be inserted in brackets for items where publication year differs substantially from the original year of publication, e.g. (Marx and Engels 2004[1848]).

Items that have no date identified can be listed as follows: (Marshall, Jaggers and Gurr ND).

References

Please ensure that your references are complete, and that all of the references in the reference list are cited in the text. All items should be listed in alphabetical order in the reference list. Items by the same author should be listed in chronological order. Wherever possible, please prepare your references using the samples below. For more than 3 authors, please cite the first author and et al.

Reference to an article

Hechter M (1995) Reflections on historical prophecy in the social sciences. American Journal of Sociology 100, 1520–1527.

References to an article in a journal that has no paper version should include the issue number as well as the volume number.

Reference to an article published online, not yet published in an issue

Dzutsati V (2021) Secessionist conflict as diversion from inequality: The missing link between grievance and repression. Conflict Management and Peace Science, DOI: xxxxxx, accessed on 15 June 2022.

Reference to a book

Elster J (1983) Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book

Simmons BA, Dobbin F and Garrett G (2008) The diffusion of liberalization. In Simmons BA, Dobbin F and Garrett G (eds), The Global Diffusion of Markets and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–80.

Reference to an edited book

Andreas P and Greenhill KM (eds) (2010) Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Reference to an electronic publication

Please indicate the URL of the webpage, date when item was accessed, plus any identifying information

Marshall MG, Jaggers K and Gurr TR (2010) Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2010. Available from http://www.systemicpeace.org/p..., accessed 18 May 2012.

Reference to an unpublished item

Aachen CH (2000). Why Lagged Dependent Variables Can Suppress the Explanatory Power of Other Independent Variables. Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology Society, Los Angeles, CA, 20–22 July.

Tables and figures: Each table and figure should be placed in the text close to where discussed (i.e., not on separate sheets at the end).

Tables should be clearly laid out and designed to fit into a space of 190 x 120mm. Tables should preferably be designed using the table editor tool in MS Word (or typeset in LaTeX), not by manually inserting spaces or tabulators. Vertical lines between columns should be omitted, and horizontal lines limited to the top and bottom of the table, with an additional one below the column headings (see published articles for examples). Totals and percentages should be labelled, and the units should be explicitly identified. See published examples.

Authors should avoid using figures with an excessive number of digits and rescale variables so that all figures in a table can be displayed with the same number of digits after decimal points, ideally nor more than 3. Use initial zeros, i.e., 0.300 rather than .300. Authors who wish to flag ‘statistically significant’ statistics using asterisks should avoid using excessive numbers of asterisks and consider alternative symbols such as a dagger if they wish to indicate a large number of significance levels.

Figures should not contain more detail than can be clearly shown in a space of 200 x 133mm and should be computer drawn. The resolution of images should be at least 300 dpi. Authors should avoid figures using shaded outer margins and figures using colours other than greyscale. Although it is possible to publish figures in colour where this is required, this must be agreed in advance and the authors may have to cover the additional costs of colour printing. Authors should ensure that they have permission to reproduce any copyrighted material.

Data citation

The British Journal of Political Science is a signatory of the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) statement, promoting data sharing and research transparency in political science.

The BJPolS Dataverse site is dedicated to the replication data for the articles the Journal publishes. Authors of accepted articles need to deposit their data and any additional materials required to replicate an article's empirical analyses on this site, which can be found here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS

(A step by step guide to uploading the data to the site can be found here)

Any additional materials that are non-essential to the replication of the published results, but which could be of interest to readers, should be published as supplementary material in on-line appendices to be hosted at Cambridge Core.

We acknowledge that not all articles might be straightforwardly covered by DA-RT, which is why the Journal is equally sensitive to the needs of authors working in nonquantitative traditions as well as those authors that use quantitative data, but where the ability to share data is restricted because of sensitive human subject constraints. For that reason, the Journal will take a flexible approach to data sharing and transparency where these constraints exist. Having built a strong reputation over 40 years for taking a pluralistic view on both theoretical viewpoints as well as methodological approaches, we continue to encourage researchers of all traditions to submit their work to the Journal.

Upon uploading replication data to the BJPolS Dataverse, the author will receive the citation information for the data – including a DOI:

Gandrud C (2017) Replication Data for: The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science. doi:10.7910/DVN/GSJO9Q, Harvard Dataverse, DRAFT VERSION

This should be placed in the article’s reference list and ordered alphabetically. Please replace the DRAFT VERSION with V1 and include the universal numerical footprint (UNF) if one has been provided:

Gandrud C (2017) Replication Data for: The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science”. doi:10.7910/DVN/GSJO9Q, Harvard Dataverse, V1. UNF:6:1TrYcMQn4I4uDbBrh99dVA==

The data should also be cited in a separate section headed ‘Supplementary Material’ before the reference list.

A further separate section before the reference list headed ‘Funding’ should list any acknowledgements of research support / assistance, e.g. 'Support for this research was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (Award no. ***). Replication data is available at Gandrud 2017.’

Quotations of more than 50 words should be indented in the typescript and typed in double line spacing. Use single inverted commas for shorter quotations. Square brackets should be used to enclose interpolations, and three dots to indicate omissions. Make sure there are no errors in the spelling, punctuation and capitalization of quotations.

Spelling: English or American is permitted, so long as each article employs one or the other consistently throughout. In general use the spelling –ize (not –ise), connection, judgement, dispatch, co-operation, biased, focused. Capitals: Use as few as possible and use them consistently. Italics should be used for foreign words other than proper names. Italics for emphasis are discouraged. Abbreviations: Omit full stops in abbreviations consisting of capital letters (MP, USA). Use capitals for acronyms such as NATO and UNESCO. Dates should be in the form 1 May 1968, 1970s (no apostrophe), the twentieth century. Numbers up to 100 should normally be spelt out, except for percentages, exact quantities, or a series of numbers. Use ‘per cent’ (not %) except in tables. Include a comma in numbers over 999. The second of a pair of numbers should be abbreviated (i.e. 175–6 not 175–176), except for numbers 11–19 which retain the 1.

We expect authors to use gender-neutral language.

Proofs are supplied only to ensure that the printed version coincides with the manuscript accepted. Rewriting an article in proof is not allowed. You will be sent a copy-edited version as an attachment, along with any questions that have arisen, before the article goes to the printer. Please make sure that your manuscript is in a final form at this stage.

BJPolS Data Replication Policy

The British Journal of Political Science (BJPolS) is a signatory of the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) statement, promoting data sharing and research transparency in Political Science. The journal thus maintains a strict policy requiring authors of accepted articles using quantitative data to provide all data and code necessary to reproduce their results.

Authors of accepted articles using quantitative data are required to deposit (1) their data, (2) the codebook or any other relevant description of the data, which includes information about the source of the analysis data and instructions for extracting the analysis data from source data, (3) a file containing the exact and detailed commands used by author to reproduce all tables, figures, and exhibits (i.e., “do” or “run” files), and (4) a file containing the actual output from the statistical software used (i.e., “log” or “output” file) on  the BJPolS Dataverse:

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS

Authors may post the data on their own websites as well, but the version cited in the article must be the Dataverse one. Please include the following sentence following the acknowledgments:

“The data, replication instructions, and the data’s codebook can be found at https://dx.doi.org/doi xxxxxx.”

Where “xxx” is the article-specific DOI generated by Dataverse. 

Authors are encouraged to include additional information such as mentioning, listing, or describing any specialized software that competent scholars in the field might need to reproduce the results. The replication material has to be deposited on Dataverse as soon as possible after the acceptance of the manuscript.

Articles are held back at the copy editing stage until the replication materials are deposited and it has been checked that these materials have been properly deposited in Dataverse.

A step by step walkthrough for using the BJPolS Dataverse can be found here.

Additional materials that are non-essential to the replication of the published results, but which could be of interest to readers, can be provided as supplementary material with the article. These materials will be posted on the Cambridge Core platform alongside the article.

All analyses reported in the BJPolS are open and available to the scientific research community. Authors are not allowed to withhold information that has been used to perform an analysis featured in a BJPolS piece. Exemptions may exist, and can be granted, however in the case of restricted-access source data. Under those circumstances, the BJPolS Editors will consider allowing an exception to the general policy of full data access upon the author’s request.  There may be other situations in which an exception is warranted and the editorial team will consider those if author(s) can show specific reasons why sharing data immediately is problematic.  Nonetheless, given the importance of transparency and replicability to the BJPolS, the strong presumption will be against such exceptions.

These instructions may probably not cover every possible situation that may arise, although they should be sufficient for most quantitative data analyses that are reported in the BJPolS. We also acknowledge that not all articles might be straightforwardly covered by DA-RT, which is why the BJPolS is equally sensitive to the needs of authors working in non-quantitative traditions. Any questions about the replication policy may be directed to the BJPolS Editorial Staff at bjpols@cambridge.org.

Having built a strong reputation over 40 years for taking a pluralistic view on both theoretical viewpoints as well as methodological approaches, we continue to encourage researchers of all traditions to submit their work to the Journal.

Citing data

Upon uploading replication data to the BJPolS Dataverse, the author will receive the citation information for the data – including a DOI:

Gandrud C (2017) Replication Data for: The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science. doi:10.7910/DVN/GSJO9Q, Harvard Dataverse, DRAFT VERSION

This should be placed in the article’s reference list and ordered alphabetically. Please replace the DRAFT VERSION with V1 and include the universal numerical footprint (UNF) if one has been provided:

Gandrud C (2017) Replication Data for: The Measurement of Real-Time Perceptions of Financial Stress: Implications for Political Science”. doi:10.7910/DVN/GSJO9Q, Harvard Dataverse, V1. UNF:6:1TrYcMQn4I4uDbBrh99dVA==

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

An abstract not exceeding 150 words is required for all types of articles. Please also include 5-7 keywords. For guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

• to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s).
• to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
• to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript.
• must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission.

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.

Acknowledgements

Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organisers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that that any type of funding information or financial support is listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can be recorded separately (see Funding statement above).

We are aware that authors sometimes receive assistance from technical writers, language editors, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication. Such assistance must be noted in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section, along with a declaration that the author(s) are entirely responsible for the scientific content of the paper and that the paper adheres to the journal’s authorship policy. Failure to acknowledge assistance from technical writers, language editors, AI tools and/or writing agencies in drafting manuscripts for publication in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgements section may lead to disqualification of the paper. Examples of how to acknowledge assistance in drafting manuscripts:

• “The author(s) thank [name and qualifications] of [company, city, country] for providing [medical/technical/language] writing support/editorial support [specify and/or expand as appropriate], which was funded by [sponsor, city, country]."
• “The author(s) made use of [AI system/tool] to assist with the drafting of this article. [AI version details] was accessed/obtained from [source details] and used with/without modification [specify and/or expand as appropriate] on [date(s)].