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Instructions for Contributors

Manuscript Preparation | Style | Decision Procedures | Further Information |

Articles for publication in Political Philosophy should be submitted via the journal's 'Submissions' page.

Authors are welcome to submit using any standard format. They will be required to reformat to our specific requirements below only if the article is accepted for publication .

ORIGINALITY: Submission to Political Philosophy is taken to imply that the material has not been previously published and will not be under simultaneous consideration by any other journal. If the submission forms part of a book that is currently in press, please state the projected publication date of the book and how exactly the submission relates to the book.

Manuscript Preparation

  • LANGUAGE: Submissions should be in English. They may employ either American or English spelling and punctuation, so long as the same style is used consistently throughout. In quotations and references, spelling should follow the original; punctuation, however, should follow to the style used in the body of the text.
  • LENGTH: Articles and Survey Articles should ordinarily be less than 10,000 words, including all text, notes and references. (Longer submissions will be considered only in exceptional circumstances.) Submissions for the Debate section should be less than 5000 words, including all text, notes and references.
  • ANONYMIZATION: Political Philosophy is a double-anonymous peer-reviewed journal. Please remove all self-identifying material from your document before submission, including from the document's 'properties'.

Style

  • MICROSOFT WORD: For typesetting purposes, the author must submit final copy in the form of a Microsoft Word document.
  • ABSTRACT: An abstract of less than 150 words is required; its primary function is to facilitate indexing for web searches; when writing it please bear that purpose in mind.
  • FOOTNOTES should be numbered consecutively and appear at the bottom of the page. Bibliographic information should not appear in footnotes but, instead, in a reference list at the end of the article. Literature should be cited in the form of 'Rawls 1958, p. 166'. Those citations should appear in footnotes—not as in-text references in the main body of the text.
  • REFERENCE LIST: Bibliographic information should be formatted as follows:
    • Rawls, John. 1958. Justice as fairness. Philosophical Review, 67: 164-94.
    • Habermas, Jürgen. 1992/1996. Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg. Oxford: Polity, 1996; originally published 1992.
    • Anderson, Elizabeth. 2016. The social epistemology of morality: learning from the forgotten history of the abolition of slavery. Pp. 75-94 in The Epistemic Life of Groups, ed. Michael S. Brady and Miranda Fricker. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • ILLUSTRATIONS: Publishable-quality copy of FIGURES, TABLES AND CHARTS must be supplied before for publication, along with written permission from any copyright holder to reproduce it.

Decision Procedures

Each submission will be assigned to one of the editors for handling. The responsible editor will either desk-reject it promptly or, if they deem the submission worthy of further consideration, send it to two referees of their choosing. On the basis of referee reports, and of the responsible editor's own reading of the submission in light of them, they will then make a binding editorial decision (either 'accept', 'conditional accept', 'revise and resubmit' or 'reject'). That decision will ordinarily come within three months of submission, often sooner, occasionally later.

Further Information

The above guidance can be supplemented by the more detailed guidance used by the Open Library of Humanities Journal's 'Author Guidelines', which apply to Political Philosophy where it is not directly contradicted by anything above.