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One year ago, Ada Finifter completed her service as Editor of the APSR and I assumed the post, assisted by Elizabeth Cook, the new Assistant Editor, and Editorial Interns John Donaldson, Jason MacDonald, and Tricia Mulligan; our new editorial office opened at The George Washington University; Susan Bickford and Greg McAvoy, the new Book Review Editors, opened their office at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a staff of Elizabeth K. Markovits, Maria Murray Riemann, and Carisa R. Showden; a new Editorial Board, 45-strong, was appointed and a six-member Executive Committee was named; and Cambridge University Press began publishing the APSR.
As if the challenges imposed by all this change were insufficient, our early operations were disrupted by the events of September 11 and the subsequent interruptions of mail service. Nevertheless, I am pleased to report that during 2001-2002 the APSR not only survived this often-disharmonic convergence of forces, but managed to grow and prosper while doing so.
Submissions
The number of papers submitted
In describing my goals to the Executive Council and various other groups a year ago, I expressed both the hope and the expectation that we would immediately begin to receive more manuscripts than had previously been submitted to the APSR. One reason I hoped for such growth was that it could bring in more potentially publishable manuscripts; even if the proportion of promising submissions remained constant, having more of them to consider would itself be a good thing-especially in light of the expanded number of pages that will soon be opening up for articles. No less importantly, I hoped that an enhanced flow of manuscripts would bring in more papers from parts of the discipline that have been underrepresented in the APSR's pages. My expectation that we would in fact begin to receive more submissions was based on my determination to make it known far and wide that we are eager to receive more papers than the APSR has gotten in the past, that we are working to ensure that the review process runs as it should, and that we aspire to publish the best article-length work across the full range of our substantively, theoretically, and methodologically diverse discipline.
This expectation was more than amply fulfilled during 2001-2002,...