Next article FreeTaking AccountAlyson Cole, Robyn Marasco, and Charles TienAlyson Cole Search for more articles by this author , Robyn Marasco Search for more articles by this author , and Charles Tien Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreOur Editors’ Note typically speaks to one or more of the many political controversies unfolding as we are writing, an effort to keep Polity timely, even if the production schedule adheres to a different sort of temporality. This issue’s tagline and theme of “taking account” works rather well for framing Trump’s indictment and the lack of political accountability on gun violence, climate change, reproductive justice, and police violence, for example. But rather than looking outward, as is our usual perspective, we decided for this Editors’ Note to turn inward and take a preliminary account of Polity itself under our co-editorship.This issue marks the midpoint in our five-year term as co-editors of Polity, having now published ten issues of the journal. We thought it might be an appropriate moment, therefore, to consider what we have observed so far and what we aim to accomplish during the second half of our term. Fittingly, this issue also includes other sorts of accountings—a “Classics Revisited” symposium engaging a text that took political scientists to account for having only described what is rather than envisioning what might be done, a midterm election forecasting postmortem, and an “Ask a Political Scientist” with a scholar who demands that the discipline question its own assumptions about how politics works and where to study it. Likewise, each of the research articles offers an interpretive account of classic texts by Plato, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, respectively, and the debates they inspire.Serving as co-editors of Polity, which has been in print since 1968, publishing some of the finest scholarship in the field, is a genuine honor. In our editorial roles we have sought to build upon and expand the journal’s reach, reputation, and impact. We have aimed to fill the pages of Polity with innovative scholarship in the discipline from a range of voices, approaches, and perspectives. Indeed, one change we proposed in our bid to become editors was to increase the diversity of authors. Of the authors who published in Polity in 2022, 47% self-identified as female. In 2021, the percentage was 48%. This is a notable increase from the average of 31% from 2016 through 2019. As for the racial and ethnic diversity of Polity’s authors, in 2022, 33% self-identified as authors of color. This is an increase from 2021 when 20% of authors self-identified as non-white. (We have no other comparative point here, since no data on race and ethnicity was collected prior to our editorship.) Continuing to pry open the discipline to a greater range of scholars remains an editorial priority.Polity has long had a reputation as a leading journal for work in Political Theory and American Politics, especially research focused on American Political Development. This has meant that we receive a great number of theory manuscripts. In 2022, 39% of manuscripts submitted were in Political Theory, 21% in American Politics, 18% in Comparative Politics, and 6% in International Relations. This represents a more even distribution of submissions among the four main subfields compared to 2021, when 54% of submissions were in Political Theory, 16% were in American Politics, 15% were in Comparative Politics, and 10% were in International Relations. We remain committed to being a home for work in all the established subfields, as well as for scholarship pushing against these silos. We evaluate all submissions using the same rigorous standards, regardless of subfield, and will continue to do so in the future.To further enrich the content of Polity, we have used our special features, such as “Ask a Political Scientist,” “Classics Revisited,” and special symposia to help broaden our authorship and, in turn, our readership. Symposia have included topics ranging from comparative methods for studying authoritarianism to the meaning of victimhood in a global context. In “Ask a Political Scientist,” we interview prominent scholars from all the subfields of our discipline, asking them about current controversies, their research, and their views about the discipline. Twice a year Polity publishes “Classics Revisited” where a range of scholars in political science and adjacent fields reflect on a canonical text. We bridge gaps between scholarly research, policy debate, and public engagement by including cutting-edge research articles alongside these special features.On the more technical matters of journal editing that may interest some, Polity has also decreased the number of desk rejections over the last two years, which means more manuscripts are being evaluated by our dedicated reviewers. In 2019, the desk rejection rate for submitted manuscripts was 68%, which is down to 55% for 2022. As the quality of manuscripts submitted continues to improve, we expect that desk rejection rates will improve as well. Our acceptance rate for submitted manuscripts has remained under 20% during our editorship.While we continue to face challenges finding appropriate reviewers for some manuscripts, our median time to a completed first round review in 2022 was sixty-two days. This number is higher than we would like, but we remain committed to finding three reviewers so that each manuscript is read both by specialists in the area, as well as by readers with a broader perspective in mind. We can report a median of two weeks’ time for a final decision on all manuscripts submitted in 2022. This number is important to us, because we know how difficult it is for authors to wait for a decision.It is a tremendous joy to work together as a team. Each issue is a genuine collective effort among the editors, our staff, and Polity’s board members, authors, and reviewers. The three of us collaborate on all matters, from selecting the cover art and the tagline to determining the mix of articles and other content for each issue. We have sought to dismantle hierarchical decision-making, adopting instead a model of collective shared-governance. We make all decisions together because we believe that having more decision-makers will ensure that accepted research will appeal to a broader audience. To our mind, being a “generalist” journal means publishing first-rate political science scholarship that crosses subfield divides and reaches beyond our discipline’s boundaries.We take immense pride in the quality of our cover art. We have been extraordinarily fortunate to have found artists willing to share their work with us and some who even created work for a specific issue, like this one. It excites us to see the journal arrive in the mail, when we can finally hold it in our hands, admire the cover, and flip through the pages. We are able to produce such a beautiful print journal thanks to the vision, creativity, and support of the entire team at the University of Chicago Press.The art on this current issue features a portrait of the preeminent political theorist, Hanna Pitkin, by Huguette Martel, the full image of which can be viewed on the inside of the back cover. The University of Chicago Press’s designer, Olivia Kinker, took Martel’s painting and reproduced it in multiple versions in different colors. The multiplying iterations of a single image is similar to the approach to theorizing Pitkin pursues in Wittgenstein and Justice, i.e., tracing the multiple, sometimes contradictory, uses of a single term. It also reflects the different interpretations of her work collected in this issue’s “Classics Revisited” symposium.Professor Pitkin passed away at her home in California on May 12, 2023. While her health had been in decline over the last year, we were able to share with her our plans for the cover image, as well as the papers collected in this special symposium. She was understandably unable to participate, but conveyed to us her gratitude for such thoughtful reflections on her work. As Alyson Cole and Be Stone explain in their introduction to the symposium, there were many reasons we selected Wittgenstein and Justice as the “classic” text to revisit, but we had not conceived of this project as a festschrift. We learned of her death as the world did, with this issue already well into production. We imagine, therefore, that this collection of essays will be the first of many efforts to reconsider the remarkable body of work that Pitkin produced. She was a gifted and creative mind and modeled for so many of us a practice of political thinking. We mourn her passing and hope for the survival of political theory in the great tradition that Hanna Pitkin represented.Several of Pitkin’s books could have been plausible candidates for our “Classics Revisited” series. She is probably best known across the discipline for her first book, The Concept of Representation,1 which is required reading for anyone interested in how political scientists use concepts, generally, and the concept of representation, in particular. For many of us, Fortune is a Woman remains her most brilliant and original work, as it was the first major study to treat gender as a significant aspect of Machiavelli’s thought.2 It also offered a synthesis of psychoanalysis and political theory, one very different from a more recent recovery of Freud for political thinking in the age of Trump.3 The Attack of the Blob is her most comprehensive interpretive feat, bringing the whole of Hannah Arendt’s corpus into focus around the question of the social and its relationship to politics.4 This book laid the theoretical terrain on which an entire generation of democratic theorists would find their own footing.What is perhaps unusual about this “Classics Revisited” is that we feature a text somewhat underappreciated among most political scientists, even political theorists.5 Pitkin’s approach to Wittgenstein, and the lessons she draws from ordinary language philosophy, remain largely untapped as a resource for political theory and political science. Her approach opens up new ways of thinking and working across disciplinary divides, focused on the words we use and the different meanings we attach to them. While it is undeniable that Wittgenstein and Justice is an invaluable work of political theory (the chapter on Book 1 of Plato’s Republic is a master-class in conceptual analysis, for example, and should be a staple in our syllabi), we aimed to assemble a symposium that would highlight the multidisciplinary reach of Pitkin’s scholarship. This symposium includes contributions from prominent scholars in philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, American politics, and political theory. After an introduction by Alyson Cole and Be Stone, there are essays by Veena Das, Sandra Laugier, Toril Moi, George Shulman, Paul Snell, and Linda M. G. Zerilli, demonstrating the influence and impact of this important text.6The research articles in this issue provide new and surprising interpretations of canonical works of western political theory. Rob Goodman in “Plato the Novelist: The Family Saga in Republic 8–9” reads the account of regime decay in the Republic as an intergenerational family narrative and asks why Plato would have described this process “through such an emotionally charged narrative.”7 Goodman considers two different accounts that Socrates offers for the relationship between family and political narratives, and proposes that these difficulties oblige the reader to pay close attention to the characters and plot. Goodman also considers the kinds of political action that the family saga might inspire in the Republic’s readers.“Mind the Gap: A Machiavellian Lesson in Anti-Racism,” by Isaac Gabriel Salgado, provides an original reinterpretation of Machiavelli’s analysis of the tension between appearances and reality. Salgado looks to the history of the development of blood purity statutes in early modern Spain, as it relates to Machiavelli’s thinking.8 Treating these statues as expressions of racial anxiety, Salgado argues that Machiavelli resisted such racialism by rejecting the idea that truth and appearances could ever be reconciled.“Spectacles, Political Education, and Democracy: Re-reading Rousseau’s Letter to M. D’Alembert,” by Çiğdem Çıdam takes Rancière as an interlocutor in rereading Rousseau on the spectacles of theater and festivals. Çıdam argues that Rousseau’s primary criticism of theater is its dangerous democratic potential to undermine the hierarchy between “those who should instruct and those who should be instructed.”9 Contra Rancière, Çıdam finds Rousseau troubled not by the possibility of passive spectatorship, but the opposite—that a passive moral education will be replaced by a democratic reconfiguration of the sensible.After the research articles is a midterm forecasting symposium, in which seven forecasters revisit and evaluate their 2022 midterm election forecasts. The 2022 midterm elections in the United States were typical in many regards, while surprising in others. Turnout was at near-record levels for a midterm election, where expectations from journalists and some political scientists was for a “red wave” election, especially in the House. The red wave never materialized as Republicans picked up only nine seats in the House to give them a controlling majority, and ended up losing one seat in the Senate. The forecasters ranged in their predictions from a forty-two-seat loss for the Democrats to a fifteen-seat loss, with an unweighted average of a twenty-seven-seat loss. Some forecasters did better than others, as is always the case. In each of the postmortems, the authors offer brief histories of their forecasting models, present the model specifications and accuracy of their 2022 forecasts, and discuss what lessons they learned and how they would adjust their models for future elections.10The issue concludes with our feature, “Ask a Political Scientist,” where Charles Tien and Robyn Marasco ask Professor Yuen Yuen Ang to help us understand recent events in China and how studying China can help us see and study politics differently.11 Ang is an award-winning scholar, author, and teacher in multiple disciplines. Her responses to our questions provide a nuanced picture of what has been going on in China over the last several decades, including the last few months as the country ended its zero-COVID policy, as well as a sense of Ang’s intellectual depth and vision. We thank Professor Ang for engaging so thoughtfully with our questions. With this interview, readers can expect to better understand China, the social sciences, and their own worldviews.We want to thank Huguette Martel for allowing us not only to use her art but to transform it on our cover. We also want to take a moment to express our gratitude to our editorial assistant and copy editor, Be Stone. We hired Be, then a doctoral student at The Graduate Center at CUNY, shortly after we took over as editors. We cannot imagine publishing Polity without them. Be is now beginning a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Politics and Law at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Their students and colleagues at Rhodes are very lucky to have them join their ranks. Fortunately for Polity, Be has agreed to continue working with us. We want to heartily congratulate Be, but we are relieved that we will not need to bid them farewell.Notes1. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967).2. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984).3. Joseph Bernstein, “Not Your Daddy’s Freud,” The New York Times (March 22, 2023) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/style/freud-psychoanalysis.html.4. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).5. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993[1972]).6. Alyson Cole and Be Stone, “‘We’ Should Be An Invitation: Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Veena Das, “Hanna Pitkin on Conceptual Puzzlement,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Sandra Laugier, “In Different Voices: Pitkin and Cavell on Wittgenstein’s Political Relevance,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Toril Moi, “Acknowledging Hanna Pitkin: A Belated Discovery of a Kindred Spirit,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; George Shulman, “Ordinary Language and Race: Hanna Pitkin and Toni Morrison in Tandem and Tension,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Paul Snell, “Wittgenstein and Justice as Method,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; and Linda M. G. Zerilli, “A New Style of Thinking: Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx.7. Rob Goodman, “Plato the Novelist: The Family Saga in Republic 8–9” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx, at xxx.8. Isaac Gabriel Salgado, “Mind the Gap: A Machiavellian Lesson in Anti-Racism,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx.9. Çiğdem Çıdam, “Spectacles, Political Education, and Democracy: Re-reading Rousseau’s Letter to M. D’Alembert,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx, at xxx.10. Jay A. DeSart, “A State-Level U.S. House Election Forecast Model for 2022: Modeling the Potential Effects of Gerrymandering,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Stephen Quinlan and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, “A Political-History Forecast Model of Congressional Elections: Lessons Learned from Campaign 2022,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Bruno Jérôme, Véronique Jérôme, Philippe Mongrain, and Richard Nadeau, “Forecasting the 2022 U.S. House Elections with a State-by-State Model: No Red-Carpet Treatment for the Republicans,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Charles Tien and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, “Referendum Model Forecasts: Trump and 2022 Midterm Errors,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Joyce E. Berg, Thomas S. Gruca, and Thomas A. Rietz, “Iowa Electronic Markets Seat Distribution Forecasts for the 2022 U.S. House and Senate Elections: A Retrospective,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; Brad Lockerbie, “Economic Pessimism and the 2022 Election: A Postmortem,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx; and Alan I. Abramowitz, “The Generic Ballot Model and the 2022 Midterm Election,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx.11. Charles Tien and Robyn Marasco, “Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Yuen Yuen Ang on China and Political Science,” Polity 55 (2023): xxx–xx. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Ahead of Print The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/725423 HistoryPublished online June 05, 2023 © 2023 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.