The Oxford Handbook of Political Science

"Okay, a shaggy dog story. I edited the Oxford Handbook of Political Science , which built on ten volumes of sub-disciplinary handbooks. I was the general editor of that series, and co-editor of a couple of those volumes myself. But before that series of books, there was a New Handbook of Political Science , which I co-edited. That grew out of the World Congress of the International Political Science Association. I was the Program Chair of that, and it was a lot of work. That was back before many people were on email, so there was a lot of faxing and snail mail… I decided I wasn’t going to go to all that trouble and have only the conference program to show for it. So I convened a series of “state of the discipline” sessions in that conference, and drew on those sessions for the New Handbook of Political Science . That sold very well – it sold 10,000 copies, and Russia produced another 50,000 for deposit in every library in the country. So Oxford University Press saw this is a money spinner, and they wanted more. I was having drinks with the editor of OUP, congratulating me on the success of the new handbook – “Wouldn’t you like to do some more?”. And I said, “Yes, okay. What about some handbooks for each sub-discipline of the field? I’ll get a specialist in each to organize them.” These were all long books, and the market was American graduate schools. You have to sit field exams in three subfields of political science, and these handbooks would serve as a resource textbook for graduate students across the country. It worked out pretty well. Then, at the end of the day, I consolidated those ten handbooks into my one Oxford Handbook of Political Science by choosing four chapters from each. That’s how I produced my second overview of the discipline as a whole."