Governance

About Governance

About the Journal

Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions — usually cited simply as Governance — is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering executive politics, public policy, public administration, and the organization of the state. It is published by Wiley (Wiley Periodicals, LLC) in association with the International Political Science Association's Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government (SOG). Founded in 1988 and published quarterly, it carries the print ISSN 0952-1895 and the online ISSN 1468-0491.

The journal's official description presents it as "a political science and public administration journal for the theoretical and practical discussion of executive politics, public policy, administration, and the organization of the state," with an emphasis on an international approach to public policy and administration. Its distinguishing editorial rule is that all papers, regardless of empirical focus, should have wider theoretical, comparative, or practical significance — a standard that has kept the journal resolutely comparative and theory-engaged rather than narrowly descriptive.

Governance is widely regarded as one of the leading journals in its field. Wiley's journal page currently lists a Journal Impact Factor of 4.0, a CiteScore of 6.1, an acceptance rate of 9%, and a median time of 12 days to first decision — figures that reflect both high selectivity and an efficient editorial process.

History and Development

Governance was founded in 1988, at a moment when the study of government was being reshaped by the New Public Management movement, the comparative study of state capacity, and a renewed interest in institutions across the social sciences. From the beginning it was published in association with IPSA's Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government (SOG), giving it an institutional anchor in the international political science community and a readership that spans political scientists and public administration scholars on every continent.

The journal's development tracks the major intellectual turns in the study of governing over nearly four decades. In the 1990s, its pages hosted early debates on policy transfer and lesson-drawing — David Dolowitz and David Marsh's landmark 2000 article on learning from abroad, for example, grew out of research conversations that the journal had been cultivating throughout the decade. In the 2000s, the journal became a central venue for the "governance turn" itself: the shift from studying government as a set of formal hierarchies to studying governance as networks, partnerships, instruments, and modes of steering. Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès's influential 2007 special-issue introduction on policy instruments, published in the journal, exemplifies that turn.

In the 2010s and 2020s, Governance has been at the forefront of debates on state capacity, the quality of government, regulatory governance, and democratic backsliding's administrative dimensions. Francis Fukuyama's 2013 article "What is governance?" — one of the most cited pieces in the journal's history — used the journal's pages to argue that political science needed a clearer conceptual separation between the scope and the strength of the state.

Earlier editorships included Robert H. Cox and Alasdair Roberts, who were listed as co-editors in 2009 (per the journal's official blog), guiding the journal through a period of growing internationalization. The journal's blog, governancejournal.net, long served as an active companion venue for debate among its editorial community.

Across its history, the journal has maintained a distinctive identity: international and comparative in orientation, theoretically ambitious, and equally at home with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method research — provided the work speaks to the core questions of how contemporary states govern.

The journal has also played an agenda-setting role in conceptual debates about "governance" itself. As the term spread through political science, development policy, and public management in the 1990s and 2000s — often used loosely to mean everything from good government to networked policy-making — Governance's pages became one of the principal arenas where scholars argued over what the concept should mean and how it should be measured. That sustained conceptual stewardship is a large part of why the journal's title has become shorthand for an entire subfield.

Aims and Scope

The journal publishes theoretical and empirical work on the institutions and processes of governing. Its scope centers on:

• Executive politics — the organization, behavior, and power of executives, cabinets, and central government
• Public policy — policy processes, policy instruments, policy change, and policy implementation across sectors and countries
• Public administration — bureaucracies, administrative reform, street-level implementation, and the administrative dimensions of democracy
• The organization of the state — state structures, intergovernmental relations, agencification, regulation, and state capacity

The international and comparative emphasis is programmatic, not decorative. Manuscripts with a single-country empirical focus are expected to draw out theoretical, comparative, or practical implications that travel beyond the case. The journal is not a venue for corporate governance research or for stand-alone literature reviews without an original argument; its pages are reserved for work that advances understanding of how public authority is organized and exercised.

Thematically, the journal has been especially influential in several research programs: the comparative study of policy instruments and "governing by instruments"; the analysis of regulatory governance and the regulatory state; research on the quality of government and impartial institutions; and the study of policy transfer, diffusion, and lesson-drawing across borders.

Editorial Leadership

Governance is currently co-edited by Professor Paolo Graziano and Professor Adam Sheingate, as listed on Wiley's official journal page.

Paolo Graziano is Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua in Italy, and a research associate of the European Social Observatory in Brussels. His research focuses on Europeanization, European public policy, social movements, and populist parties, and his work has appeared in leading journals including Governance, the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, and the Journal of Common Market Studies. He has served as co-editor of Governance since 2018.

Adam Sheingate is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, where he joined the faculty in 2000 and served as department chair from 2015 to 2020. His research spans American political development, historical institutionalism, and comparative public policy; his books include Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy and The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State, and he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism.

Together, the two editors combine European and American perspectives, comparative politics and public policy expertise, and a shared commitment to the journal's international orientation. They are supported by an international editorial board drawn from political science and public administration departments worldwide.

Journal Metrics

The following figures are displayed on Wiley's official journal page (retrieved October 2026):

• Journal Impact Factor: 4.0
• CiteScore: 6.1 (Scopus)
• Acceptance rate: 9% — indicating a highly selective review process
• Median 12 days — the median time shown on the metrics display (time to first editorial decision)

OpenAlex data (as displayed on this site) gives the journal an h-index of 103, reflecting a deep and sustained citation record built over nearly four decades. Historically, the journal has ranked near the top of the public administration and policy studies field; in earlier Journal Citation Reports editions it ranked as high as 4th of 169 journals in the political science category.

The combination of a high impact factor and a single-digit acceptance rate places Governance among the most competitive outlets in political science and public administration — comparable within its field to the top general-interest journals, though its reputation is strongest among scholars of institutions, policy, and administration rather than in general political science.

Open Access and APC Policy

Governance is a hybrid journal: authors may publish through the traditional subscription route at no charge, or they may choose Wiley's OnlineOpen option to make their individual article freely available under a Creative Commons license. Wiley's published hybrid APC price list (via the CRKN consortium, 2023 edition) lists Governance at $3,860 USD / £2,520 / €3,240 — a third-party-published figure that may have changed since 2023, so authors should confirm the current APC on Wiley's site or through their institution's Wiley agreement.

Many authors pay no APC at all because their institutions participate in Wiley transformative agreements, under which open access publishing costs are covered centrally. The journal's recent issues include a substantial share of open access articles, and Wiley's standard self-archiving policy allows accepted manuscripts to be deposited in institutional repositories after any applicable embargo.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal's Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore listings confirm its coverage in the principal citation databases:

• Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Web of Science — the basis of its Journal Impact Factor
• Scopus — the basis of its CiteScore

The journal is additionally covered by the major political science, public administration, and social science abstracting services used by research libraries worldwide, ensuring its articles are discoverable across the standard disciplinary databases.

Landmark Papers

The following five articles rank among the most cited ever published in Governance (citation counts from OpenAlex, retrieved October 2026). All DOIs were verified against the Crossref registry.

1. David P. Dolowitz and David Marsh (2000), "Learning from abroad: the role of policy transfer in contemporary policy-making"

Governance 13(1), 5–23. DOI: 10.1111/0952-1895.00121 (~3,306 citations).

The journal's most cited article of all time. Dolowitz and Marsh developed a framework for analyzing policy transfer — the process by which knowledge about policies and institutions in one political system is used in another — distinguishing voluntary lesson-drawing from coercive transfer. The article effectively founded the modern political-science literature on policy transfer and remains the standard reference for the field.

2. Derk Loorbach (2010), "Transition management for sustainable development: a prescriptive, complexity-based governance framework"

Governance 23(1), 161–183. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2009.01471.x (~1,753 citations).

Loorbach translated complexity theory into a prescriptive governance framework for sustainability transitions, arguing that governments can steer long-term societal transitions through adaptive, multi-level "transition management." The article became a touchstone for research on environmental governance and the governance of socio-technical transitions.

3. Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès (2007), "Introduction: understanding public policy through its instruments — from the nature of instruments to the sociology of public policy instrumentation"

Governance 20(1), 1–21. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2007.00342.x (~1,498 citations).

The introduction to a landmark special issue, this article argued that policy instruments — the tools governments use, from regulation to taxation to information campaigns — are not neutral technical devices but institutions in their own right that structure political relationships. It launched the "sociology of policy instruments" as a research program and reshaped how policy studies think about the tools of governing.

4. Bo Rothstein and Jan Teorell (2008), "What is quality of government? A theory of impartial government institutions"

Governance 21(2), 165–190. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2008.00391.x (~1,453 citations).

Rothstein and Teorell proposed that the quality of government should be defined as the impartiality of government institutions in the exercise of public power. The "impartiality" definition gave the sprawling good-governance literature a precise conceptual core and became the theoretical foundation for the Quality of Government research program and its widely used datasets.

5. Francis Fukuyama (2013), "What is governance?"

Governance 26(3), 347–368. DOI: 10.1111/gove.12035 (~1,277 citations).

Fukuyama argued that political science conflates too many things under "governance" and proposed distinguishing the scope of state functions from the strength (capacity) of state institutions. The distinction clarified debates about state-building, development, and the relationship between democracy and effective government, and the article is now a standard assigned reading in graduate courses on the state.

Publishing in the Journal

Governance publishes original research articles; the most common formats are full-length articles and contributions to guest-edited special issues on emerging themes. Manuscripts are submitted through Wiley's online submission system. Given the 9% acceptance rate displayed on the journal's page, competition is intense: successful submissions typically combine a clear theoretical contribution with rigorous empirical analysis and explicit comparative or generalizable implications.

Wiley's author guidelines require a Data Availability Statement declaring whether replication materials are available and how they can be accessed, and the journal encourages deposit of replication data in citable repositories. Manuscripts should follow the journal's style guide, and authors should emphasize the originality of the argument and its relevance to the journal's core themes of executive politics, policy, administration, and state organization. Work that is purely descriptive, confined to corporate governance, or framed as a stand-alone literature review is unlikely to fit.

Special issues offer another route into the journal: the editors regularly commission guest-edited collections on emerging topics, and these issues have produced some of the journal's most cited work — including the Lascoumes and Le Galès collection on policy instruments. Prospective guest editors are welcome to submit proposals, which are evaluated for thematic coherence, international contributor balance, and fit with the journal's comparative and theoretical mission.

Readership and Influence

Governance is read by political scientists, public administration scholars, policy researchers, and practitioners concerned with how states are organized and how they perform. Its influence is visible in the research programs it has seeded: the modern policy-transfer literature, the sociology of policy instruments, the quality-of-government agenda, and transition management in sustainability studies all trace landmark statements to its pages.

The journal's association with IPSA's SOG research committee gives it a genuinely global author and reader base, with contributions and citations flowing across North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and beyond. Its articles are standard readings in graduate seminars on public administration, comparative public policy, and the state, and its concepts — policy transfer, impartial institutions, transition management — circulate well beyond political science into public management practice and policy design.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Governance?

Wiley (Wiley Periodicals, LLC), in association with the International Political Science Association's Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government (SOG).

What is the full title of the journal?

Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions. It is usually cited simply as Governance.

When was Governance founded, and how often does it appear?

It was founded in 1988 and is published quarterly (four issues per year).

Who edits the journal?

The co-editors, as listed on Wiley's official journal page, are Professor Paolo Graziano (University of Padua) and Professor Adam Sheingate (Johns Hopkins University).

What are the journal's metrics?

Wiley's journal page currently lists a Journal Impact Factor of 4.0, a CiteScore of 6.1, a 9% acceptance rate, and a median 12 days to first decision.

Is Governance open access?

It is a hybrid journal: subscription publication is free for authors, and Wiley's OnlineOpen option makes individual articles open access for an APC (listed at $3,860 in Wiley's 2023 hybrid price list via CRKN; confirm current pricing on Wiley's site). Many institutions cover the APC through transformative agreements.

What are the journal's ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0952-1895; online ISSN 1468-0491.

What kinds of papers does the journal accept?

Original research articles on executive politics, public policy, administration, and state organization, with wider theoretical, comparative, or practical significance. Purely descriptive single-case studies, corporate-governance papers, and stand-alone literature reviews are generally out of scope.

Sources

• Wiley Online Library, official journal page: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14680491 — editors (Paolo Graziano, Adam Sheingate), ISSNs, scope description, metrics (JIF 4.0, CiteScore 6.1, 9% acceptance, 12-day median), IPSA SOG association
• Johns Hopkins University, Department of Political Science: https://politicalscience.jhu.edu/directory/adam-sheingate/ — Adam Sheingate's affiliation and co-editorship of Governance
• Princeton LISD event page: https://lisd.princeton.edu/events/crises-populism-and-political-leadership-italy-comparative-perspective — Paolo Graziano, Professor of Political Science, University of Padua; co-editor of Governance (2018–)
• Wikipedia, "Governance (journal)" (via secondary source map): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governance_(journal) — founding year 1988, quarterly frequency, Wiley-Blackwell/SOG association, ISSNs (secondary attribution)
• CRKN Wiley hybrid APC price list (2023): https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/sites/crkn/files/2023-02/Wiley-Journal-APCs-OnlineOpen %284%29.pdf — Governance OnlineOpen APC $3,860 / £2,520 / €3,240 (third-party-published; may be outdated)
• The GOVERNANCE blog: http://governancejournal.net/about-the-governance-blog/ — earlier co-editors Robert H. Cox and Alasdair Roberts (2009)
• Crossref registry (https://api.crossref.org) — verification of all article DOIs, titles, authors, and publication details
• OpenAlex (https://openalex.org) — citation counts identifying the journal's most-cited articles; h-index 103