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33 Pol'y Stud. J. [v] (2005)

handle is hein.journals/plyssjnl33 and id is 1 raw text is: Editor's Notes In September the Council of the APSA's Public Policy Section voted to provide the Policy Studies Journal to all members. We welcome our new subscribers, and will do all we can to make the Journal a valuable part of your libraries. Our new readers will also find that the Journal provides a high quality and highly visible outlet for their best research. Given that the Journal's panel of peer-reviewers reg- ularly provides incisive yet constructive criticism of the manuscripts we receive, submission to the Journal is both quick (with an average decision time of 36 days) and an investment in the quality of the paper. We welcome your public policy sub- missions, and provide guidance on content and format along with the submission portal on our easily accessible webpage (http://psj.ipsonet.org). As part of our new partnership with the APSA Policy Section, we have added a regular feature on the Section's business and news. This complements the organizational news of the Policy Studies Organization, and can be found at the back of this issue. Recent Journal articles have made headlines in the news media, facilitated by Blackwell Publisher's new program of issuing press releases on selected articles. Of particular note is Jorge Rivera and Peter de Leon's piece entitled Is Greener Whiter? Voluntary Environmental Performance of Western Ski Areas from our August 2004 issue. Discussion of the article-and the occasionally outraged responses to it-has appeared in papers across the country including the New York Times. We suppose that means that, if you are bashful and prefer that your work be obscure, you should publish in other journals! We wish, however, to express our semi-official editorial apologies for the pickets outside de Leon's residence, but would urge Peter to think of this development as an opportunity for more data collection (or perhaps partic- ipant observation). This first issue of Volume 33 marks the advent of our new emphasis on pro- viding exposure to the kind of scholarly exchange that is normally evident only in the blind reviews of manuscripts under consideration for publication. While these reviews remain essential for maintaining the quality of the Journal, they can also be of value when they bring to the surface theoretical, methodological or policy issues that are matters of interest and importance to policy scholars and practitioners. When our reviewers raise such issues, we will work to develop their comments into an exchange with the manuscript authors that can be published here. Our first such exchange is comprised of three manuscripts dealing with the hotly contested issue of voting technology. We are pleased to provide this set of papers for several reasons. First and most obviously is the import of the subject matter, particularly given the recent close Presidential election. The second is because this discourse illuminates nicely some of the more difficult empirical and methodological issues that confront policy scholars who focus on elections. The third is that the exchange demonstrates the complementary value of competing research programs for developing policy knowledge. Often articles are consumed individually, sans the spirited debate that often occurs in classrooms, conferences, presentations, and the reviewing process. We invited the replies to Miller's work not to identify weaknesses in this well- constructed manuscript, but to broaden the scope of the discussion. The critique by