Political Science and Education Research: An Exploratory Look at Two Political Science Journals

Abstract

A systematic and longitudinal analysis of all of the education-related articles published in two of political science's oldest journals reveals that political science has aided our knowledge of education by focusing on the distribution of power in the decision-making process, the organization and governance of public school systems, and the outcomes and effects of education policy decisions. Moreover, the present data suggest that only a tiny fraction of the major articles published in traditional political science journals have focused on education and that those political scientists conducting education research turn to multidisciplinary education journals as outlets for their scholarship.

What Happens at the Journal Office Stays at the Journal Office: Assessing Journal Transparency and Record-Keeping Practices

“…Moreover, editorial bias may spread beyond matters of methodology to include the exclusion of scholarship based on the submitting author(s)' personal characteristics or scholarly topic. Political scientists have self-policed the discipline's journals to determine whether the work published represents the profession's true diversity of scholarship on, for example, Asian-Pacific Americans (Aoki and Takeda 2004), pedagogy (Orr 2004), human rights (Cardenas 2009), Latin America (Martz 1990), urban politics (Sapotichne, Jones, and Wolfe 2007), and comparative politics (Munck and Snyder 2007). Other research (Breuning and Sanders 2007; Young 1995) has studied whether the work of female political scientists is adequately represented in the discipline's journals.…”