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Journals have personalities. To some extent those are coterminous with the personalities and proclivities of their current editors. A journal's personality is also moulded by its past and its path to the present. Journals are powerfully shaped by the circumstances of their birth and their early years. They evolve over time to fit an academic niche. As that environment changes, the adaptive strategies available to any given journal are a function of the characteristics it has acquired over time.
The World Into Which This Journal Was Born
It is hard from this distance to re-envisage the world into which the British Journal of Political Science was born in 1971. There may or may not have been appreciably fewer political scientists in the world back then.1 Certainly, anyway, political scientists are currently much more career-active than they were in the early 1970s. You notice that in the numbers attending conferences. The size of the American Political Science Association Annual Meetings has trebled over the period - and with it the number of conference papers people are trying to place in journals. You notice that in general expectations concerning productivity. APSA's 1971 president (Robert Lane, no slouch when it came to publishing) had published only two-thirds as much by the time of his presidency as his 2008 counterpart (Peter Katzenstein).2 The change in Britain is even more striking. Brian Barry recalls:
When the British Journal of Political Science ... had been running for a couple of years, Tony King and I, its first two editors, were struck by the absence of contributions from senior academics in Britain. To find out what was going on, we commissioned a count of articles in all journals by British academics of the rank of senior lecturer and above, which showed that very few were publishing articles anywhere...3
Such stubborn refusal to publish became utterly inconceivable in British universities in the wake of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that started in 1986.
By the same token, back then there were far fewer journals in which to publish academic political science. Most of the long-established journals were designed to appeal to the interested general public. For American examples, think of Political Science Quarterly (founded 1886), Foreign Affairs