The review process of the QJPS is designed to provide authors with timely decisions. Submissions are initially reviewed in-house to filter out manuscripts that are inappropriate for various reasons such as excessive length, falling outside the scope of the journal, or generally lacking the requisite quality to warrant demands on referees' time. The remaining manuscripts are peer-reviewed under the supervision of the editor for the relevant subfield. Referee reports are considered advisory but not definitive in the editors' decisions. Revise and resubmits are used sparingly.

The QJPS is committed to making editorial decisions based solely on the quality of the work, and will not discriminate on the basis of the race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, political ideology, popularity, rank, title, or institution of the author(s). Editors will make their initial decision on a manuscript (e.g., desk rejection vs. external review) without knowing the identities of the authors. If the Editors decide to send a paper out for review, they will then learn the identities of the authors so that they can select appropriate referees without conflicts of interest. If a paper is sent out for review, the review process is single-blind with referees remaining anonymous to the author(s).

Submit a Manuscript

Please submit your manuscript to Manuscript Manager and follow the instructions in the system to complete the submission. If you have not previously submitted to Manuscript Manager, you will need to create a new account and enter your information.

Please adhere to the QJPS Style Guidelines for writing your manuscript.

The QJPS blinding policy means that authors must submit their manuscript in two parts: a title page and an anonymized submission without any indication of the author's identities.

• The title page contains the title of your manuscript, names(s) and contact information of all author(s), and any other parts of the manuscript which reveal the identities of the author(s).
• The submission includes the title, abstract, main text, list of references, tables and figures and so on. All information which reveals the author's identities should be removed from the submission.
• Optional forms for first submissions include a Cover Letter and Online Appendix.

During the submission process, authors must also indicate if they are a colleague, coauthor, student, advisor, or relative of any members of the QJPS Editorial Board. Any editor with such a connection to an author will be recused from the editorial process.

The Author(s) declares that the manuscript has not been previously published, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and that its publication is approved by all co-authors, if any, and any other authorities at the corporation/institute/university where the work was done. Further, if accepted, the work will not be published elsewhere in similar form.

If you have any questions on the submission process, please contact the QJPS Administrator at qjps@nowpublishers.com.

Authors of empirical papers may be asked to supply a replication data set for editors or referees. Upon acceptance of a manuscript, authors will be required to submit a replication dataset/archive prior to publication. The dataset, documentation, command files, etc. will be reviewed in-house and made available at this site coincident with publication. Online appendices, if any, will be handled similarly. Authors of theory papers may provide an appendix with supplementary proofs for editors or referees. The online appendix and supplemental files are not copyedited and are posted directly on the website as supplementary information to the paper. Authors are required to send the final version of their supplemental files when submitting the final manuscript.

Results-Blind Review

The QJPS is committed to publishing well-designed, well-powered studies on interesting and important questions, regardless of the results. To affirm this commitment and to mitigate publication bias, the authors of empirical papers can opt into results-blind review. That is, authors can submit empirical papers with the results redacted. The paper should be otherwise complete, the author should make a convincing case that they have sufficient power/precision, and the author should explain how they would interpret different results. If the authors are given a Revise and Resubmit, they will resubmit the full paper with the results included.

If an author would like to utilize this option, they should indicate that they are doing so in their submission. There should also be a note on the first page of their manuscript files indicating that this is a results-blind submission.

Preregistration of Empirical Studies

Authors are not required to have pre-registered their empirical studies, but if they did pre-register their study, they must follow these guidelines. If a pre-registered submission does not comply with these guidelines, the Editors reserve the right to reject the paper or ask the authors to revise the paper to comply with these guidelines.

• Pre-analysis plans should be disclosed as part of the referee process.
• They should be time-stamped and posted to a known repository before the authors had access to the data.
• They should be specific enough that another expert could conduct and replicate the analyses if they had the data.
• All pre-registered analyses should be presented in the paper or appendix.
• Any deviations from the pre-analysis plan should be explained and justified.
• Any additional analyses in the paper that weren’t pre-registered should be demarcated as such.

Thank you for your interest in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.