Political Science Editing and Proofreading Services

Democracy is coded on a scale from zero to ten and the analysis proceeds. Whether the scale rewards competitive elections, or civil liberties, or the absence of a dominant party, and where a country sits when it has two of those and not the third, are decisions somebody made — and the paper's central finding is a finding about those decisions as much as about democracy.

We edit what political scientists write — quantitative papers using cross-national or survey data, measurement and index construction work, comparative politics studies, public opinion research, institutional and legislative analyses, political behaviour papers, policy analyses and reports, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on measurement: how a concept became a variable.

Measurement is where a political science claim is made or lost, and the failure is a concept operationalised without the coding rules being visible. The step from an idea to a number is an argument and it belongs in the paper. We work through these so the concept is defined before the measure is introduced, since a definition supplied after the fact will always match whatever was measured; so the coding rules are given in enough detail for another researcher to apply them, because "coded from news reports" describes a process and not a rule; so ambiguous and boundary cases are named with how they were resolved, given that these are where the measure's content actually lies; so an existing index is used with its known properties and its disagreements with alternatives, as different democracy measures rank the same countries differently and the choice can drive the result; so the direction and likely size of measurement error are discussed rather than assumed to be random; so a robustness check uses a genuinely different measure of the same concept rather than a variant of the same one; and so the claim is stated in terms of what was measured. Papers written this way are the ones that survive replication with someone else's data.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished analyses, survey data and reports before release. We are editors rather than political scientists, and we offer no view on measures, findings or politics. What we can do is make the step from concept to variable visible.