The American Political Science Review Goes Woke
APSR is officially now just another grievance studies journal
The American Political Science Review (APSR) isn’t just some random academic journal — established in 1906, it is (ostensibly) the best and most prestigious polisci journal in the world. Careers are built upon a single publication here.
Fun fact: Satan himself, Dick Cheney, published an article there in 1970:
Nowadays, it exists solely to give woke Twitter influencers top publications so that SJWs can pretend they have earned their credentials. It has been skinsuited by mental midget affirmative action radical feminists who have stolen the valor of the serious heavyweight scholars who came before them and built the journal’s reputation up to what it is today.
Do you think I am being hyperbolic? I am not.
For starters, check out the editorial team that took the journal over in 2020/2021:
Is having a whole editorial board of women ok?
Are two wrongs better than one wrong?
If I could describe this team in one word it would be: ragtag. They aren’t heavyweights in the field of political science… they are nobodies. One of them works at Yale and is respectable, I guess. The other 11 are scrubs.
It is a very perplexing decision. The American Political Science Association (APSA) has 11,000+ members and could have easily picked 12 female heavyweights, but instead, they picked 12 lightweights.
Even if the APSA had picked 12 competent women, that still would’ve been super weird. Zero men? Zero diversity? Zero Hispanics or Asians? Just 10 liberal upper-class white women and two of their token black friends. Sorry, tokens, but it is true. I looked at your resumes and the 2 of you are below average in your already-way-below-average peer group.
I support treating people as individuals instead of as tokens. That is why I oppose this massive affirmative action. It engenders the soft bigotry of low expectations — nobody will ever trust a female scholar’s CV ever again. Parading these 12 clowns around does nothing but set the feminist movement back by a decade and devalues the career of every female scholar who got to where she was based on merit.
Shouldn't the top female scholars be pissed about this?
It would be as if the first female president was Lindsay Lohan.
Sure, you have achieved pantsuit girlboss status… but at what cost?
These types of people don't care about the 'legitimacy' of these disciplines or their scientific accuracy. In fact, these types of scholars prefer to advance academic research that aligns with their political ideology at the expense of research or findings that run counter to their worldview. They also prefer research to be activist in nature - i.e. academics actively pushing their research in public and engaging in praxis - rather than producing knowledge that can be disseminated by unaffiliated individuals, the media, outsiders, ect.
— anonymous Political Scientist
These are 12 Democrats. Where are the Republicans? Isn’t the field of American politics almost exactly 50% Republican? Why are 12 communists controlling the top political science journal? Where is the diversity of thought?
Case in point, here is a message about abortion plastered on the front page of the APSR website at this very moment — despite half the country opposing abortion. They are not even pretending to be scholars rather than Democrat Party activists.
By making the editorial board all women — but also comprised of all race and gender scholars — they can claim that any criticism of the selection is sexism and surely only the result of disgruntled men.
EVERY ONE OF THE 12 is a scholar of gender or race. Fully seven of them are affiliated with departments of WOMEN, GENDER & SEXUALITY — the least rigorous and most pathetic disciplines in all of academia — rather than Political Science departments.
None of these women can code, and none of them can do advanced math. None of them can understand a vanilla difference-in-difference regression.
Who among the board can seriously claim to be capable of editing a formal theory or methods paper?
Which of the editorial team is capable of running a replication?
Anyone? Anyone?
They each have long glowing Wikipedia pages… despite none of them having tangible achievements or name recognition.
Of the 12, only 1 of them has actually published an article in the APSR prior to actually running APSR. Meaning they have been put in charge of a journal that they are too dumb to publish in in the first place.
This is literally a communist coup of the most important institution in the entire field of Political Science. It should be a scandal. I would estimate the average IQ of these apparatchiks is 110, meaning they are more mentally suited to be ditch diggers or janitors or DMV clerks — or mothers! — than scholars. Maybe if they were baristas at my local coffee shop they would actually provide value to society in the form of delicious oatmilk cappuccinos. Instead they provide negative value to society.
The Hijacking of APSR
It is worth examining how this editorial team rose to power.
Our story begins ~two years ago when the APSA leadership was tasked with picking the next team of editors who would serve from 2020-2024. Their choice boiled down to two teams:
The UT Austin proposal (REJECTED)
This was an innovative proposal by a diverse team of universally respected heavyweight scholars, proposing a truly innovative governance framework including:
Results-blind review
Triple-blind review
Blinded clarification emails to authors
Questions to elicit reviewers’ overall sense of a manuscript’s potential for publication
Suggestions for expediting the review process
Digital publication
Post-publication replication
The abolition of strict page or word limits
CONSORT for experimental research design
Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)
Code Ocean for pre-publication verification
Post-publication replication studies
Optional publication of reviews and responses for accepted articles
Use of digital community space
Weighing the overall significance of a study (beyond its value for a subfield)
The Woke Proposal (ACCEPTED)
Click here to download the proposal
The only reason we have access to this proposal in the first place is that someone leaked it to me. The UT Austin team open-sourced theirs, but the woke one had to be leaked. This despite the woke proposal bragging about transparancy (see below), saying “Transparency in how editorial decisions are made is critical”… and yet this woke team did not want the world to see their proposal in which they codify their affirmative action policies… I got my hands on it anyways.
If there is to be an explicit affirmative action policy, it should be transparent — not secretly imposed by an unelected cabal.
The profession has the right to know that everyone who isn’t a white male needs to have a major asterisk added to the latest APSR on their CV.
“The editorial team will take affirmative action to provide full reviews by substantively-relevant scholars to all work submitted by women and people of colour and to all work that addresses race, gender, and sexuality in politics.”
This is an explicit policy of guaranteeing all women and minorities full reviews.
They don't desk reject women.
Only work by white men is eligible to be desk rejected.
How is white defined?
Are we going by the “one-drop rule” here?
Are arabs white? The Canadian census says they count as white.
How is a woman defined?
I am not a biologist.
This policy is directly taken from the Women's Caucus.
The common thread is that Julie Novkov is an editor at APRS and was also chair of the women's caucus last year
“We intend to publish problem-driven scholarship that is well-conceptualized, ethically-designed, and well-executed; research on topics and by scholars the discipline has been slow to engage; and work that uses a range of methods and approaches to address both timely and timeless questions about power and governance that are central to the study of politics everywhere."
"problem-driven" is code for activist research;
"research on topics and by scholars the discipline has been slow to engage" is code for gender, racec, ethnicity, ect.;
"power and governance" is code for intersectional research.
"We also aim to increase the diversity of submissions, authors, reviewers, and citations along lines including race, gender, sexuality, ability, national origin, and type of institution."
Does "sexuality" here imply that they'll ask for authors' sexual orientation? Or try to figure it out by looking at online pictures? What does it mean in practice? How do they know who is Gay or Bi or Asexual?
Emphasis on Twitter and Reddit
They give bonus points to papers if the authors have a large Twitter following
They promise to organize an annual Reddit AMA which is exactly what 100iq midwits would do
and they didn’t even follow through on this AMA promise
Someone sent me an old SNL skit where Michael Dukakis is in a debate with George Bush, who is of course depicted as having a hard time putting together a full and coherent sentence. After listening to Bush blathering on, Dukakis looks straight into the camera and says (in his usual droll manner), "I can't believe that I am losing to this guy." That is no doubt how the UT team must be feeling.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
Because why have triple blind reviews, replication and publish reviews for published articles when you can just hire a team that will publish a majority of articles by female authors no matter what?
— Anonymous Political Scientist
Just looked at the UT Austin proposal. Wow. Racially and methodologically diverse with innovative ways of actually addressing inequalities in our discipline. I hope this fiasco inspires people to participate in the governance of their professional associations.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
I have published just short of a handful of articles in the APSR, and I would be the first to say that the journal is a pale image of its former self. As the flagship journal in the discipline, the APSR is often called upon to do things other than publish the best work, particularly since the Perestroika movement in the late 1990s. But this movement toward using criteria other than publishing the best work has accelerated as of late, particularly as the APSA has become more politicized. The journal is now more interested in appealing to the woke elements of the discipline than in publishing the best work in political science. I find relatively little important work published in the APSR, and the best work in the discipline is now being published by other good journals.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
There was one editorial team that was a no-brainer choice--this was the UT Austin team. No reasonable committee members applying widely-accepted scholarly standards could have come up with any other choice. The only way that the current team could have been selected is if the search committee set aside rigorous scholarly criteria and substituted non-scholarly (political, diversity) criteria instead. This is what happened in this case, and the APSR is making a good run at losing its reputation for publishing top-notch scholarly research. I now look elsewhere for the best research in political science.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
I do think that there are good reasons for there to be a national association of political scientists, but the current APSA has become highly politicized and hostile to those outside of its hyper-woke core. The APSA should be politically neutral and should welcome political scientists of all political and ideological stripes, but as current configured it is far removed from that ideal.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
This is an important point--the fault lies in the APSA leadership more concerned about DEI than scholarly rigor in selecting the APSR editorial team. This is why I am no longer an APSA member. I would encourage those who are sufficiently concerned by this fiasco to discontinue membership in the APSA and turn your attention to other scholarly organizations that fetishize DEI less and emphasize rigorous knowledge production more.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
If just one or two of these individuals had made an APSR editorial team comprised of other top scholars, most reasonable scholars would say, "Oh, how cute--not APSR editor quality, but its important to have diversity on the editorial team." Instead, the APSA has selected an editorial team comprised completely of B team members so that it can virtue-signal its bats**t crazy diversity fetish and that diversity is prioritized over merit. The APSA could have sent a diversity signal with an all-female editorial team AND compiled an editorial team deserving of scholarly respect. Instead, the APSA did its best to reinforce the (false) view that diversity and high-level merit do not mix. With this editorial team pick and with its recent editorial team picks, the APSA has shown itself to be incapable of responsibly administering its own journals.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
Seven of This APSR Team’s latest Fuckups
Marvel Madness
This paper is embarrassing. The abstract speaks for itself. This is blog level rigor.
“So there are nearly 100 references and I count maybe 3-4 as legit political science research (if you include an article in PS about superheroes). Most of the citations are to sources like Netflix, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, Luke Cage, and a bunch of newspapers and magazines.“
— Anonymous Political Scientiest
Normative Whiteness
The morning starts with some amazing news: our co-authored article on normative whiteness and racism in the European Parliament has just been accepted for publication in the American Political Science Review @apsrjournal @ERC_Research‼️ An article co-authored by the whole team accepted to THE political science journal: American Political Science Review @apsrjournal The topic, most important too: ”It’s like shouting to a brick wall”: Normative whiteness and racism in the European Parliament ‼️ @ERC_Research
EUGenDem @EUGenDemAnother Doozy at the APSR
Nepotism by Leach the leech
In this paper the author reads one court case and then just riffs for a dozen pages. This article is a lot of things, but it's not science. Is it activism? It's probably intended to be, but it's so incoherent it's hard to tell.
One of her advisors is on the editorial team (two of her three publications have been at journals where one of her advisors is an editor).
Mirya Holman’s hat-trick (3 APSR pubs in one year!)
Oh look, another mid-career or senior professor that has never hit above subfield or third-tier outlets suddenly hits APSR three times with woke-aligned articles.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
I guess I never thought of this, but Holman getting three probably hurts her. One is awesome for anyone who gets it; three in a year is a function of the editorial board. Can't be anything else. Nothing in her previous work indicates that she'd be capable of putting three pieces in the flagship journal across her entire career. Then the editorship changes, and she gets three in a year, at least one of which is not a particularly good study at all. There can be unintended consequences here that end up hurting women.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
The key is MH's record is she can't publish anything in a top general journal. Then all of a sudden 3 APSR. Sorry, her work is Gender and Politics, SSQ, and State Politics and Policy. Nobody believes this is earned.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
Never published better than sub-subfield journals. Then one day, out of nowhere, she suddenly gets showered with APSR hits the moment a political activist editorial group takes over. LOOK AT THIS QUEEN, SHE IS SO AMAZING AT PUBLISHING
— Anonymous political scientist
Mane it is weird. MH can't sniff a top 3 publication in her first 50 articles (mostly 3rd and a handful of 2nd tier outlets) and suddenly you get an activist all female board and she hits 3? It's sus.
— Anonymous Political Scientist
Woke APSR strikes again
Elegant eloquent
This one isn’t that serious, it is just funny.
#TuesdayTip: A series of equations, eloquent though they may be, are rarely enough to develop a persuasive argument. Make sure that important equations are explained briefly or restated in plain language in the text.
In this tweet they mean elegant, not eloquent. Can't do math, can't write.
A Fraudulent Paper as a Test of Character
Shuo Chen 2: Electric Boogaloo
Last month I caught Shuo Chen committing egregious research misconduct in the American Economic Review:
Now I have found a second fraudulent Shuo Chen paper.
Actually, credit for this discovery should really go to an anonymous Chinese grad student who blogged about it a few years ago — this blog was floating around China but never made its way to America.
You can translate this page to English using google translate, and when you do, you will see that the student finds a APSR paper written by Shuo Chen and James Kung paper misreported the main regression — it claimed to have included fixed effects, but did not. Running the regression as reported completely kills the findings.
If you say you ran an analysis with fixed effects but then didn't include them, that's fraud. Especially when the authors have a long history of such happy coding accidents.
Here is how the Chinese grad student ends the blog post — I guess disillusionment is universal:
James Kung: A Serial Manipulator
https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/james-kung-a-serial-data-manipulator
"This is extremely suspicious. Speculating, it looks like the authors had a nice paper using provincial data, but a referee asked them to extend it to prefecture leaders. To fit their story, they needed to find an effect of land sales for secretaries (but not mayors), and an effect of GDP growth for mayors (but not secretaries). But maybe the data didn’t agree, and their RA had to falsify the mayor promotion data to get the ‘correct’ result. This wouldn’t be easy for referees to spot, since the replication files didn’t include spell-level data. But how else did they collect such error-ridden data that also just happened to produce results consistent with their story?"
Source: https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications on the Chen and Kung 2019 QJE paper:
Last week I contacted the APSA to file a complaint over this fradulent paper. This was their response:
Now that a formal investigation has kicked off, the APSR editors have two choices.:
Act like a woman: be petty, vindictive, ideological, and personal. Do not retract the paper. Leave a fraudulent paper that everyone knows is fraudulent sitting in your journal just to give me the middle finger.
Act like a man: rational, truth-seeking, and objective. Do what needs to be done. Retract the paper for the sake of science.
I leave this choice up to the current APSR editorial board. The polisci profession is waiting with bated breath to see if you will retract this paper. We are all watching you.
The Bigger Picture
Political science doesn’t matter. It is a dead profession. It is a lost cause. Everyone knows they are nothing but talentless activists and shills. The reason why this “ASPR goes woke” story matters, then, is because it serves as a prominent cautionary tale for other disciplines that actually still matter.
What happens when the best economics, math, computer science, engineering, medicine, chemistry, and biology journals are captured by wholly incompetent gender scholars? That spells the end of western civilization.
What is happening right now at APSR and APSA is what has always happened in communist revolutions across the world. Capture institutions, then use those resources and ability to make rules to shape them how they see fit.
Call these APSR shrews what they really are: communists. The hostile takeover of APSR is a prime example of the long march through Western institutions. They must be fought tooth and nail.
What Can Be Done?
What happens next is that you either fight against the communists or you end up in the gulags.
There are thousands of political science professors reading this article.
You each need to quit the APSA and stop paying your APSA membership fees.
Don’t submit papers to APSR.
Don’t review for them.
Don’t hire based on job market candidates having APSR on their CV.
Vote against the next slate of woke APSA leadership candidates.
Vote for Ron DeSantis in 2024.
Finally, someone should contact FIRE as well as the Foundation Against Racism and Intolerance, and any other legal team that might be willing to file a lawsuit. The editors of the flagship journal in academia are implementing different review policies based on the race and gender of the author. Sue them.
Maybe when the Supreme Court bans affirmative action in a few months, you will then have proper grounds to sue them.
Brutal and scathing assessment of the reality of the farce of academics.
"As humorless, self-righteous, insufferable and mediocre as corporate journalists are, they still fare better in all those metrics than academics." - Michael Malice
You misspelled embarrassing. And Dion is a nutter who couldn't get tenure at Georgia Tech.