Political Science Quarterly

• 1. Introduction

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  Political Science Quarterly has been publishing since 1886, making it one of the longest-running journals of its kind in the United States. A single question hangs over any publication that old: how does a journal of government, politics, and policy stay relevant across more than a century of upheaval? The answers lie in the people who built it, the institution behind it, and the slow work of scholarly gatekeeping that has shaped American political thought issue by issue.

• 2. Founding and Origins

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  John W. Burgess of Columbia University founded Political Science Quarterly in 1886, serving as the first president of the Academy of Political Science. The journal did not emerge in isolation. New York publisher George A. Plimpton played an active role in bringing it into existence alongside Burgess, lending the project a practical commercial footing from the start. The Academy of Political Science, which Burgess led, has remained the journal's publisher ever since, an unusually stable institutional arrangement that has spanned well over a century.

• 3. Editorial Longevity

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  Demetrios James Caraley, a political scientist at Columbia University, held the editor's chair for 43 years, from 1973 to 2020. That tenure is striking by any measure in academic publishing, where editorial turnover tends to be far more frequent. The current editor-in-chief is Robert Y. Shapiro, also of Columbia University, continuing the journal's long association with that institution. Each issue carries five or six full articles alongside up to 40 book reviews, a format that has given the journal a reputation as a serious venue for both original scholarship and critical engagement with the broader literature.

• 4. Standing in the Field

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  According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal recorded an impact factor of 2.675 in 2020, placing it 60th out of 183 journals in the category of Political Science. The SCImago Journal Rank assigned it a score of 1.025, ranking it 159th out of 1,316 journals in the broader Sociology and Political Science category. These two measures use different methodologies and different reference sets, which is why the journal's relative position shifts between them. What both confirm is that Political Science Quarterly occupies a recognized and durable place in a crowded field, more than 130 years after Burgess and Plimpton first put it into print.