Aims and Scope

Established in 1971 by Giovanni Sartori, the Italian Political Science Review is the official journal of the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica (SISP), and acknowledged as the flagship publication of the Italian political science community. Over five decades from its launch, IPSR/RISP continues to publish high quality and original peer reviewed research by leading political scientists and the best young scholars, from Italy and around the world.

IPSR/RISP embraces all approaches to political science research, without restriction to any particular theory, method or topic. Whether theoretical or empirical, articles should seek to engage with current debates and disciplinary developments. Contributions are welcome from all subfields, including Italian politics, European politics, comparative politics, political behaviour, political theory, political economy, political methodology, public administration, public policy and international relations.

IPSR/RISP focuses on political science research which is based on and interacts systematically with the literature of the discipline; which contributes to the advancement of the discipline including empirical contributions inserted in a clear theoretical framework; or with a more theoretical focus which is aimed at guiding and structuring empirical research.

IPSR/RISP employs a strict double-anonymous peer-review process.

Types of Article

The journal accepts the following types of article:

• Research Article*
• Research Note*
• Book Review

* 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.

Research Articles: IPSR publishes rigorous, peer-reviewed full length manuscripts of 6,000 to 8,000 words (including footnotes and references but excluding the article's title, abstract and keywords) that significantly advance scholarship through the original analysis of a salient political or policy issue, the exploitation of new data, or the innovative development and application of theory. It is the author's responsibility to provide the editors with an accurate total word count for the article on submission. 

Research Notes: IPSR publishes various types of peer-reviewed Research Notes of 3,000 to 4,000 words (including footnotes and references but excluding the research note's title, abstract and keywords). It is the author's responsibility to provide the editors with an accurate total word count for the article on submission.

The following types of research notes are published in IPSR:

Dataset RN introducing in detail one or several novel data sets, along with their linkage potential. These RN should include some examples of which research questions can be pursued with the data sets described.

Null findings RN presenting empirical null findings. We particularly encourage the submission of these types of RN in order to advance our knowledge and avoid unfruitful research in the same area.

Technique RN presenting a new empirical data collection method (e.g., type of sampling, web scraping, etc.) and/or analysis technique (e.g., scaling and classification techniques, experimental designs, etc.) on the basis of an interesting research question.

Replication RN replicating former analyses using the same data and methods or using new methods/extending the data (authors of the original articles need to be contacted in advance, to allow them either to cooperate in the replication or to prepare a reply).

Concepts and Terms RN reflecting on widely used terms in political science, and their use in relationship with different concepts, also related with different subdisciplines and/or theoretical perspectives.

Literature RN presenting specific interpretations of the literature on a given topic, with the focus of presenting new theoretical notions and/or research questions at the end.

Political Facts RN discussing the theoretical and analytical challenges presented by a recent political fact (event, phenomenon), and outlining (with strong and structured reference to existing literature) a number of potential research questions and/or theoretical challenges that such fact presents to future research.

Book Reviews: IPSR publishes Book Reviews of 1,000 to 1,200 words. Book Reviews offer informative, critical and fair discussion of important newly-published books in political science, by explaining how they address serious theoretical debates and how they speak to broad questions in both political science and the wider social sciences. See below for more information on Book Reviews.

The editors reserve the right to decline manuscripts without review that do not comply with IPSR editorial policies and standards.

Preparing your article for submission

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure that you carefully read and adhere to all the guidelines and instructions to authors provided on this page. Manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned. 

Submissions to IPSR must include two documents, Title Page and Main Document, as separate files to facilitate anonymous peer review. Preferred formats are MS Word and LaTeX. Only electronic files conforming to the journal's guidelines will be accepted.

1. Title Page: This file includes corresponding authors and co-authors (provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email and mailing address. Full author names and academic affiliations are required for all co-authors), the word count of the manuscript (including title, main text, footnotes and references) and acknowledgments. Besides, authors should include a statement reporting any competing interests and source of funding (where no known competing interests or funding exist, please include the following statements: "Competing interests: The author(s) declare none" and "Funding: This research received no specific grant from any public or private funding agency"). Further information about what a ‘competing interest’ is and how to write a competing interests statement can be found here. Please also state your ORCID ID.

2. Main document: This file includes title of the manuscript, abstract, keywords, full text, footnotes, references, figures and tables. Manuscript length should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (for Research Articles) or between 3,000 and 4,000 words (for Research Notes), including tables, figures, footnotes, references and printed appendices, but excluding the abstract, title and keywords, as well as any supporting material that can be relegated to an online appendix. Manuscripts beyond 8,000 words will be sent back to the corresponding author prior to review.

The title of the article should be concise, informative and accurate. All articles should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words summarizing the significant coverage and findings and up to 8 keywords. The text should be double-spaced throughout and with a minimum of 3cm for left and right hand margins and 5cm at head and foot. Footnotes and captions for tables and figures may be single-spaced. Fonts should be standard 12pt. All pages should be numbered. To facilitate the evaluation by the reviewers, tables and figures should be included in the main text rather than at the end of the document. Please also refer to guidelines on manuscript style below.

Guidelines on manuscript style

Spelling: IPSR accepts either English or American spelling. Authors are encouraged to have the manuscript language edited before submission, particularly if English is not their first language. This could substantially enhance understandability for editors and reviewers. Authors should use a gender neutral language.

Style: Manuscripts should effectively and informatively state their contribution and communicate it clearly to a general political science audience. Avoid a lengthy discussion of the previous literature, instead clearly identify gaps in this literature and state the original contribution of the manuscript.

Subheadings: Contributors are encouraged to include up to two levels of subheading in articles to provide ‘signposts’ for readers.

Footnotes: These should be numbered in the main body of the manuscript appearing in superscript and Arabic. Footnotes should be standard 10pt and may be single-spaced. Please keep the use of footnotes to the minimum.

Quotations: Authors should clearly mark citations by double quotes. Any quotation should be appropriately referenced. Use single inverted commas to draw attention to slang expressions or words used for special effects. Please keep the use of quotations and inverted commas to the minimum.

References: References should be indicated in the typescript following the Harvard system, that is, by reporting the author’s name, with the year of publication in parenthesis, e.g. Skocpol (1979), or (Skocpol 1979), or (Skocpol 1979, 33-34). For references with three authors, all authors should be listed, e.g. (Clarke, Stewart, and Whiteley 1998). If references include more than three authors, only the first one should be listed, followed by 'et al.' ('et al.' is not italicized), e.g. (Banducci et al. 2008).

The references should be listed in full at the end of the paper according to the rules inferable from the following guidelines and examples.

Reference to an article

Author AB (2015) Where’s the party? The decline of party institutionalization and what (if anything) that means for democracy. Government and Opposition 50, 420–445. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.20...

If the article is published online early and not yet in print:

Author DA and Author EB Politics and Parliamentary Oversight in the European Union. Government and Opposition, published early online, 12 September 2016, https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.20...

Reference to a book

Author KD (1997) Federalism and Ethnic Conflict Regulation in India and Pakistan. New York: Palgrave.

Author WS, Author DJ and Author NR (1956) A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 2nd edn. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book

Author DE (1988) The New Hollywood. In Author AB (ed.), The Harvard History of World Cinema. New Haven, CT: Harvard University Press, pp. 2–20.

Reference to an edited book:

Author K and Author S (eds) (1983) Industrial Crisis: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reference to a report or paper in a series (include web address if available):

Author ED and Author YN (2011) Inequality and Poverty under Latin America’s New Left Regimes. Tulane Economics Working Paper Series 1117, https://ideas.repec.org/p/tul/...

Reference to conference papers and theses (include web address if available):

Author P and Author A (2006) Testing Publius’ Federalism: Losers Consent, Winners Lament? Paper presented at the Conference on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Seville, 26 March, www.cses.org/plancom/2006Sevil...

Author PD (2013) The Patronage Network: Broker Power, Populism, and Democracy. PhD dissertation, Yale University.

Internet references:

Projects

Author P and Author D (2010) The Institutions and Elections Project, Binghamton University, www.binghamton.edu/political-s...

Web articles

Author P and Author M (2002) Youth Voter Turnout Has Declined by Any Measure. Fact sheet, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement fact sheet, http://pweb.jps.net/~lsbonnin/... (accessed 21 May 2015).

Speeches available online

Author G (2010) The Financial Situation. Speech, Mansion House, London, 16 June, www.gov.uk/government/speeches... (accessed 3 December 2012).

Newspaper article

Author G (2010) The Financial Situation. The Guardian, 16 June.

Newspaper article online

Author BG (2010) The Financial Situation. The Guardian, 16 June. www.gov.uk/government/speeches... (accessed 3 December 2012).

Equations: Use equations and formulas whenever they improve the presentation of formal and statistical arguments. Make the mathematical presentation as clear as possible with consistent notation and formatting. All symbols need to be clearly defined. Authors should choose a notation that makes the argument as easy to follow as possible to ensure readability. Equations should contain appropriate punctuation and be numbered consecutively, with subnumbering if appropriate, e.g. equations 1a and 1b.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

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.

Preparing your book review for submission

For more information about preparing your book review for submission to IPSR/RISP, please refer to these guidelines.

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 and instructions below 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”.

Replication policy, datasets and supplemental files

IPSR has signed the Joint Statement on Data Access and Research Transparency.

Authors are required to make replication material publicly available prior to publication. The replication materials must be sufficient to replicate results in all tables and figures printed in the article, including simulations for both theoretical and empirical work. Data and replication code must be uploaded to the IPSR Dataverse at http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ipsr-risp. If authors have strong reason to believe that they are unable to do this they should talk in the first instance to the editors to arrange a suitable alternative.

Required materials typically include all data used for the analysis, specialized computer programs or the source code of these algorithms, program recodes and a file which details what is included in the data set and how the results can be reproduced. English must be used to describe variables and labels or provide a correspondence table. Datasets must fulfill GDPR regulation. 

Authors will be responsible for responding to enquiries about data replication. Manuscripts will be rejected for publication if the replication material is not uploaded.

See the separate instructions for authors to upload the data and replication code on IPSR/RISP Dataverse.

IPSR/RISP editors will release the study once they are satisfied with the material provided. After the release, your article will be ready for publication in IPSR/RISP. Remember, making your data accessible and replication of your findings easy may significantly increase the impact of your article.

Even for qualitative research, IPSR encourages data access and research transparency. In case of interviews, authors should upload a list of the places and dates of the interviews on the IPSR Dataverse. Without breaching confidentiality, they are encouraged to provide longer excerpts from the interviews if they are relevant to the arguments of their article. If the research relies on documentary evidence, they should provide a detailed list of all the documents and sources. There is no need to upload these documents. Guidelines for uploading to the IPSR Dataverse can be found here.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

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)].