Editor’s Note

As we ring in this new year, I am deeply honored to begin my second term as editor of Political Communication. Allow me to share some updates with you.

First, our editorial team is undergoing some changes as we welcome two new associate editors, Michael Chan (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Magdalena Wojcieszak (University of California, Davis). We are delighted to welcome Magdalena and Michael to the team, and we also bid fond farewell to Frank Esser and Kjerstin Thorson, with heartfelt thanks for their hard work and dedication to the journal these past three years.

I am also happy to announce the next editor of the Forum, Ulrike Klinger (European University, Viadrina). Ulrike will take the reins from Mike Wagner, who did so much to create and shape the Forum since its founding. Thanks to Mike, the Forum has always been a valuable space to explore timely topics and fresh ideas in political communication outside the constraints of a lengthy peer review process. Ulrike has articulated a vision for an exciting next phase in the life of the Forum that will focus on current events across the globe that carry meaning for the broader political communication community by challenging mainstream concepts, bringing in new perspectives on common problems and extending our field’s intellectual horizons. The Forum will contribute to making our field more diverse by actively bringing in scholars from a range of backgrounds, regions, genders, ethnicities and academic ages, and through regular “spotlight issues” highlighting regions and populations that are still underrepresented in our field.

Broadening Inclusion and Representation

This vision for the Forum reflects our team’s continuing work to broaden the representativeness and inclusivity of research published in the journal. The internal audit I reported on in my last editor’s note (Lawrence, 2023) revealed the extent to which this journal has focused on studies of “WEIRD” contexts and has reproduced inequalities in society and the academy by largely overlooking questions of race and gender. Deen Freelon and his coauthors (Freelon et al., 2023) sharpened that picture by showing the strongly white, male, US skew of the “communication citation elite,” many of whom have been published in this journal. We plan to update our internal audit this year.

As we seek to shift these patterns, we continue to strive to offer substantive feedback to manuscripts from under-studied contexts that we desk reject, and to selectively offer “reject with opportunity to resubmit” decisions on manuscripts from under-studied contexts that we believe could, with substantial input from reviewers and the editorial team, ultimately be publishable in this journal. This is necessarily a slow and incremental process, and we will be tracking the impacts of this effort over time.

With these ongoing challenges noted, we are excited by the (slowly) widening spectrum of work featured in the journal – some in the Forum, such as Josephine Lukito’s essay in this issue on scholarly solidarity, and some in the main pages of the journal, such as Annette Malapally’s study, also in this issue, of how Black disadvantage is discussed less than white privilege on (the platform formerly known as) Twitter. We have seen an increase in fascinating studies on/from China and other Asian countries, including Jennifer Pan’s study in this issue of Chinese state media on Twitter, and from non-democratic contexts elsewhere around the world, including Anton Shirikov’s study in this issue on how Russian citizens discern disinformation. Special issues offer another opportunity to highlight under-studied contexts. We look forward to an upcoming special issue on “Computational Propaganda in the Global South,” to be edited by Hossein Kermani, Taberez Neyazi, and Sophie Lechler.

Our new associate editors also bring a keen eye to questions of inclusion and representativeness in research. Magdalena’s recent coauthored introduction to a special issue of Journal of Communication (Stromer-Galley et al 2023) displayed a high level of transparency about the manuscript selection process and the ongoing challenges of diversifying research in our field to gain “insights on the uses, experiences, or effects of social media on individuals, communities, and cultures that are rarely given voice or scholarly attention.” And Michael’s application to join the editorial team eloquently articulated the need for Political Communication to extend a more explicit welcome to non-Western scholars and scholarship.

Incorporating Open Science & Meeting New Methodological Challenges

Meanwhile, as most readers will know, this past year we added a Data Editor to our team: Bernhard Clemm (GESIS). In consultation with our editorial team, Bernhard has worked diligently to create policies and processes that allow for first steps toward incorporation of open science principles while minimizing burdens on authors – and minimizing further reproduction of inequalities across topics or modes of research. (For example, we are not requiring data review for qualitative data, given concerns articulated by this community about special challenges of subject anonymity, etc). Bernhard and I will be reflecting on what we’ve learned so far in a forthcoming essay in this journal.

Relatedly, our editorial team recently coauthored an essay for the Political Communication Report (Lawrence et al., 2023) which pointed toward new methodological challenges for our field. The convergence on forms of data that are most easily accessible introduces an availability bias into our field’s collective work. The rapid growth in computational methods and tools presents challenges of data accuracy and transparency and has unfortunately sometimes been accompanied by thinner theoretical grounding on one hand, and an over reliance on simple statistical tests that become meaningless in the context of very large data sets, on the other. And the even more rapid growth of AI tools like ChatGPT raises new questions about human versus machine contributions to research and sharpens the need for transparency and critical thinking among authors and editors alike.

Rigor & Relevance in a Troubled World

What I wrote in last year’s editor’s note seems even truer at the beginning of 2024: Our journal and our field face a rapidly shifting academic and real-world context in which the critical importance of political communication research is increasingly evident. War, terrorism, racial and global injustice, and an alarmingly accelerating climate crisis present an unprecedented set of challenges for society. Meeting these challenges will require effective and ethical political leadership, meaningful political representation, and informed public debate, all of which are dwindling in disrupted public spheres (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018) shot through with distrust, disinformation, increasingly blurred lines between the manufactured and the real – and, as Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason argue in this issue, increasingly marked by the threat of political violence.

As we head into what will likely be a contentious and pivotal year in real-world political communication, an ongoing priority of mine is to make sure our journal remains both highly rigorous and highly relevant. I’m immensely proud of the work we’ve published over the past year and in this issue that speaks directly to urgent issues of our time.

As always, thank you for your support, and I welcome your thoughts.