jop-tables-figures - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: jop-tables-figures description: Use when designing tables and figures for a The Journal of Politics (JOP) manuscript. JOP counts pages (not words) and includes tables and figures in the page limit, so exhibits must be self-contained, legible, regenerated by code, and economical with space. Designs exhibits; it does not run analyses.

Tables & Figures (jop-tables-figures)

At JOP, exhibits compete directly for pages: tables and figures count toward the 35-page (Research Article) or 10-page (Short Article) limit. Every exhibit must earn its space, stand on its own, and be regenerated by the deposited code so the replication analyst's re-run matches the printed page.

When to trigger

Designing or revising the main tables and figures
A reviewer found an exhibit unclear, overcrowded, or redundant
The paper is over the page budget and exhibits are the obvious place to cut
Deciding which exhibits belong in the main text vs the Online Appendix

Principles

Self-contained. Title, units, N, and notes let the exhibit be read without the text. Define abbreviations and estimators in the note.
Show the quantity of interest. Prefer plots of marginal effects, predicted probabilities, or coefficients with CIs over dense coefficient dumps a general reader cannot parse.
Legible in print and grayscale. Colorblind-safe palettes; distinguishable line/point styles; vector output (PDF/EPS).
One job per exhibit. If a table tries to do three things, split it or move two to the appendix.

Manage the page budget

Tables and figures are part of the page count — a single sprawling table can cost a full page.
Keep main-text exhibits to the few that carry the argument; move balance tables, full regression grids, and secondary plots to the Online Appendix (≤ 25 pp), which is excluded from the 35.
A Short Article rarely needs more than one or two exhibits — choose the decisive one.
Prefer compact, well-designed tables over wide landscape monsters that eat space and break in print.

Reproducibility of exhibits

Every table/figure is produced by a script, not hand-edited; the numbers must match the text and the deposited package.
Name the script that generates each exhibit in the readme so the JOP analyst can map exhibit → code.
Re-run end-to-end before submission so figure files are current.

Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)

Generate exhibits from the fitted result, not by retyping numbers (the usual source of body-vs-supplement drift). Full map: execution-with-mcp. Journal of Politics spans observational and experimental political science; report the identifying assumption and the magnitude, not just stars.

Tables: etable (multi-model columns) or did_summary_to_latex straight from the result_id.
Figures: plot_from_result / enhanced_event_study_plot / event_study_table — axis units and the SE/clustering note baked in.
Every note names the estimator + clustering and states the effect size in interpretable units.

See a full fitted-result → exhibit chain in the JF execution walkthrough.

Anti-patterns

A coefficient dump where a marginal-effects plot would communicate the result
Exhibits illegible in grayscale or at print size
Hand-tuned final figures the code cannot regenerate (fails the replication check)
Filling the main text with exhibits and blowing the page budget when the appendix exists

Worked micro-example (illustrative)

The AVR-turnout author's first draft puts a six-column regression table in the main text — full coefficients, two pages of print. A referee cannot read the effect off it and the page cost is steep. The fix replaces it with one marginal-effects figure: predicted turnout by adoption status with 95% CIs, colorblind-safe, vector, self-contained note giving N and the estimator. It reads in grayscale and the coefficient table moves to the appendix.

Referee pushback patterns and the JOP fix

"I cannot read the effect off this table." Replace the coefficient dump with a marginal-effects or predicted-probability plot showing the quantity of interest with uncertainty.
"The exhibits push the paper over length." Keep only the few that carry the argument in the main text; move balance tables and full grids to the appendix.

Exhibit pass for Journal of Politics

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the political mechanism, evidence design, and scope condition; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: political-science reviewers who want theory, identification or formal logic, and generalizable political implications in balance.

Do the pass: For every table or figure, state the estimand or object, sample or case base, uncertainty display, and one sentence the exhibit proves for the venue audience.
Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
Sibling guard: compare against APSR for field-wide political science, AJPS for design-heavy empirical work, World Politics for comparative/international politics; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Exhibit list】main-text vs appendix split
【Each exhibit】self-contained? shows quantity of interest? [Y/N]
【Legibility】grayscale/colorblind-safe, vector output? [Y/N]
【Reproducible】generated by named script, matches text? [Y/N]
【Page cost】main-text exhibits within budget? [Y/N]
【Next】jop-writing-style

Supplementary resources

../../resources/external_tools.md — plotting and exhibit-export tooling (coefplot, ggplot2, marginaleffects, sf/tmap)
../../resources/official-source-map.md — JOP page-limit rules (exhibits count toward the limit)