Now Open! View 3 active calls for papers for PS: Political Science and Politics
PS: Political Science & Politics features timely, peer-reviewed articles on contemporary politics written for the informed, general reader and commentary and debate on major issues in the political science profession.
Special Issue on Forecasting the 2026 US Midterm Elections
Special Issue on Forecasting the 2026 US Midterm Elections
Who will win the next election? This question is a central one to the social sciences and the media. Beyond the demand in the public to know the outcomes in advance, forecasting offers researchers the opportunity to test their theoretical framework and hypotheses immediately. With the increasing availability of data made possible by new technologies, the toolbox of forecasters has considerably expanded over the last two decades. Forecasting has been one of key sources of innovation in political science methods and data, with forecasters using and analyzing vote intention polls, statistical models, crowdsourcing, election markets, machine learning, synthetic polls and artificial intelligence, and big data, among other methods, to provide predictions of election outcomes and geopolitical events.
The 2026 US Midterm elections have already received an incredible share of attention in the media and across the globe. The major political changes introduced by the Trump administration, significant shifts in the United States’ economy, and questions about political stability not only increase the stakes of the election but also introduce new questions for many existing models of political forecasting that rely on long term economic and political measures in their models. Add to that the unprecedented political changes in the United States – from mid-decade redistricting to growing issues of political violence – and the 2026 Midterm elections are not just politically important but provide new challenges and opportunities for political forecasters.
Submission Deadline:
July 17, 2026
About the Special Issue
In this issue, we invite forecasters to develop innovative models to reflect these dynamic circumstances, and to reexamine how long-term models can apply under unprecedented political changes. The goal of this issue is to both provide long term forecasters the opportunity to test and develop their models, and for new forecasting voices to emerge and challenge conventional forecasting ideas. We also invite commentary on forecasting and how it shapes and is shaped by our political environment.
Continuing the tradition of PS featuring forecasting collections since 2004, our special issue will address the increasing demand by the media and the public for political forecasts, including new forecasting voices to meet the needs of the time. In a time of ever increasing hyperpartisanship in the United States and declining political trust, it is also important to highlight the challenges of forecasting in a polarized environment and how forecasters should respond.
Objectives
The objectives of the special issue are as follows:
- Examine the performance of existing models and methods in forecasting election outcomes;
- Identify methodological innovations in the forecasting of US midterm elections;
- Determine the limits and challenges of election forecasting;
- Draw conclusions about the potential consequences of forecasting on US public opinion.
We are interested in article-length (4,800 word) submissions for this special issue that address one or more of these objectives. Examples of submissions might include papers that draw on the topics listed below:
- Provide election forecasts for the 2026 House, Senate, gubernatorial, or state legislative elections;
- Predict turnout, including the participation of specific sociodemographic or minority groups;
- Describe new or emerging methodologies/tools to forecast election outcomes;
- Provide a comparative perspective on election forecasting as it is conducted in the United States and in other democracies;
- Offer a critical analysis of election forecasting, its limitations, and/or its potential consequences on citizens’ behaviors and attitudes.
Submission Details
- Deadline: Manuscripts must be submitted on or before July 17, 2026.
- Timeline: All manuscripts will be peer-reviewed on an accelerated timeline. Scholars submitting articles to the special issue should be prepared to serve as referees for special issue submissions. Authors who receive R&Rs on the initial submission will be required to submit the revision no later than September 4. Articles accepted for publication will be due by September 25.
- Publication: Accepted articles will be posted on the PS: Political Science & Politics website in mid-October, 2026. The special issue will be published in the PS: Political Science & Politics journal in 2027.
- To Submit: Submit manuscripts through the online system at: www.editorialmanager.com/ps.
- Length: Manuscripts must be fewer than 4,800 words, including notes and references.
- Style, Format, References: Manuscripts must be submitted in Word, should include in-text citations that correspond with endnotes and references conforming to the Style Manual (Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition). An online appendix can be uploaded for supplementary and supporting material.
Please indicate that your submission is designated for this Special Issue in Editorial Manager.
Questions? Please submit any questions to our editorial team: ps@apsanet.org
Presidentialism in Latin America: Institutional Paths in the Making
Presidentialism in Latin America: Institutional Paths in the Making
Latin American presidentialism remains an institutional project in motion. Over the past decade, presidential systems have undergone sustained reforms affecting executive authority, legislative procedures, coalition governance, electoral systems, judicial oversight, and the mechanisms linking voters and elected representatives. These reforms unfold amid rising political distrust, perceived deficits in democratic performance, and recurrent governance tensions, producing differentiated institutional trajectories across countries.
These evolving paths reshape domestic democratic dynamics, including accountability, governability, executive constraint, and political legitimacy, and may also influence regional coordination, collective action, and responses to global challenges. Latin America provides a valuable context for studying institutional plasticity under political stress, offering lessons for comparative debates on executive aggrandizement, populist leadership, polarization, and democratic resilience, including in established presidential systems such as the United States.
About the Special Issue
This special issue invites theoretically informed and methodologically diverse contributions that analyze national-level reforms, assess their cumulative impact on differentiated trajectories, and explore broader lessons for presidentialism. The editors will write a concluding article providing an overall and critical perspective on the contributions, emphasizing both their collective and individual significance to the debate.
Submission Deadline:
September 17, 2026
Objectives
The objectives of the special issue are to:
- Advance understanding of how ongoing institutional reforms are reshaping presidential authority and inter-branch relations in Latin America.
- Analyze the consequences of differentiated institutional trajectories for democratic governance, accountability, and legitimacy.
- Identify patterns of convergence or divergence in presidentialism across countries and the factors driving institutional heterogeneity.
- Contribute to theoretical and comparative debates on how institutional changes affect broader regional dynamics, including coordination, collective action, and responses to global challenges. We welcome cross-national analyses and theoretically grounded single-country studies with clear comparative leverage. Methodological diversity is encouraged, provided that contributions engage directly with institutional reforms and its consequences for presidential governance.
We welcome article-length (approximately 4,800 words) submissions addressing one or more of these objectives.
Example topics include, but are not limited to:
- Reforms to executive authority, emergency powers, or legislative procedures and their impact on presidential powers.
- Changes in coalition governance, electoral systems, or judicial oversight and their
effects on democratic legitimacy and accountability. - Reforms affecting the voter-representatives linkages, including new forms of political representation and public engagement.
- Comparative analyses of differentiated institutional trajectories and their implications for governability, stability, and institutional performance.
- National reforms with cross-national or regional consequences, including coordination, collective action, and responses to global challenges.
- Theoretical contributions on executive aggrandizement, differences in leadership types, polarization, or institutional plasticity in presidential systems
All submissions should make distinct empirical and/or theoretical contributions.
Submission Details
- Deadline: Manuscripts must be submitted on or before September 17, 2026
- To Submit: Submit manuscripts through the online system at www.editorialmanager.com/ps.
- Length: Manuscripts must be fewer than 4,800 words, including notes and references.
- Style, Format, References: Manuscripts must be submitted in Word, with in-text citations corresponding to endnotes and references conforming to the APSA Manual of Style. An online appendix can be uploaded for supplementary and supporting material.
Accepted manuscripts will be published on First View as they are completed and will be compiled into a special issue.
From Appendix to Spotlight: Validation Standards in Text-as-Data Political Science
From Appendix to Spotlight: Validation Standards in Text-as-Data Political Science
PS: Political Science & Politics invites submissions for a special issue, “From Appendix to Spotlight: Validation Standards in Text-as-Data Political Science.” This special issue aims to center validation as a first-order scholarly contribution and push it to the forefront of text-as-data research in political science. We particularly welcome methodologically focused pieces to substantive studies that employ text-as-data, as well as stand-alone papers that advance validation practice in the use of machine learning models, Transformers and LLMs.
Contributions may include, but are not limited to, rigorous accounts of internal validation (e.g., error rate, performance metrics, and sensitivity analyses) and external validation (e.g., convergent, criterion, and predictive validity against independent measures or real-world outcomes). We welcome studies of domain shift, audits of off-the-shelf models and LLM-based classifiers, comparisons of zero and few-shot prompting versus reasoning approaches or fine-tuned models, and weak supervision based on dictionary or rule-based frameworks. Papers engaging human-in-the-loop annotation, coder agreement, noise modelling, and active learning are also encouraged. Benchmarking and meta-research contributions, including dataset curation, leaderboard design, and principled aggregation of performance metrics commonly used in annotation, are also within our scope.
Submission Deadline:
November 1, 2026
Submission Details
Submissions should make validation the central object of inquiry and report complete, transparent workflows. Authors are expected to provide code and, where possible, data and annotation schemes, and to discuss ethical considerations, limitations, and risks, including bias and fairness. We welcome full-length research articles, and PS particularly encourages work by and reflecting research priorities of underrepresented groups, practitioners’ research beyond academia, and authors based outside the United States.
Manuscripts will be peer-reviewed according to PS guidelines. We look forward to curating a set of articles that set some discipline good practices for trustworthy text-as-data applications, turning validation from an afterthought into a shared, teachable, and replicable practice.
- Deadline: Manuscripts must be submitted on or before November 1, 2026
- To Submit: Submit manuscripts through the online system at www.editorialmanager.com/ps.
- Length: Manuscripts must be fewer than 4,800 words, including notes and references.
- Style, Format, References: Manuscripts must be submitted in Word, with in-text citations corresponding to endnotes and references conforming to the APSA Manual of Style. An online appendix can be uploaded for supplementary and supporting material.
Accepted manuscripts will be published on First View as they are completed and will be compiled into a special issue. Please email ps@apsanet.org with any questions!