jop-theory-building - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: jop-theory-building description: Use when turning a The Journal of Politics (JOP) idea into a theoretically innovative argument — formal/game-theoretic, empirical, or normative. JOP explicitly prizes theoretical innovation across all subfields and counts pages, so the argument must be sharp, general, and economical. Builds the argument; it does not run analyses.

Theory & Argument Building (jop-theory-building)

JOP advertises that it publishes theoretically innovative work and treats theory broadly — formal, empirical, interpretive, and normative all qualify. This skill turns your idea into an argument a general reader recognizes as new, and tight enough to fit the page budget.

When to trigger

Moving from "interesting finding" to "argument that contributes"
Specifying mechanisms, assumptions, and observable implications
A reviewer said the theory is "thin," "post hoc," or "not novel"
Linking a formal model to its empirical or substantive test

Build the argument (mode-aware)

Empirical / mechanism-based

State the mechanism: what causes what, through what channel, under what scope conditions.
Derive observable implications that could be wrong — the argument must be falsifiable.
Separate predictions unique to your account from those shared with rivals (sets up jop-research-design).

Formal / game-theoretic

State primitives, equilibrium concept, and the comparative statics that carry the substance.
Make the model earn its place: what does formalization reveal that prose could not?
Pair it with an interpretable empirical or substantive payoff — JOP is general-interest, not a methods outlet.

Normative / interpretive

State the conceptual claim and the stakes; make the argument's structure explicit and contestable.
Engage the strongest opposing position rather than a strawman.
Show why the normative stakes matter for empirical politics or public life.

The JOP innovation test

Write one sentence: "Before this paper the field thought ___; this argument shows ___, which matters to readers beyond my subfield because ___." If the first blank is "no one had estimated this in case X," the contribution is probably incremental for a general journal.

Worked micro-example (illustrative)

A hypothetical project finds legislators co-sponsor more bills after office moves put them near ideological opposites. Stated as a finding, it is a correlation. As a JOP argument it names a mechanism — physical proximity lowers the cost of cross-party information exchange, raising co-sponsorship under the scope condition of low electoral risk — and yields an implication that could be wrong, unique to the proximity account and not shared by a pure homophily rival. That falsifiable contrast is what makes the argument contribute rather than describe.

Referee pushback patterns and the JOP fix

"The theory is thin — this is a list of expected signs." Name the mechanism (what acts on what, through what channel, under what scope) and derive at least one implication that could fail.
"The formal model has no payoff here." Pair the comparative statics with an interpretable empirical or substantive consequence; JOP is general-interest, not a methods outlet.

Keep it economical (page budget)

A general reader needs the logic, not every contingency — state the core argument cleanly.
Long proofs, derivations, and auxiliary results go in the Online Appendix (≤ 25 pp).
Hypotheses should be few and load-bearing; a wall of H1–H12 wastes pages and dilutes the contribution.

Anti-patterns

A "theory" that is really a list of expected signs with no mechanism
A formal model with no empirical or substantive payoff in a general-interest venue
Hypotheses unconnected to the eventual test (see jop-research-design)
Theory so elaborate it cannot be developed and tested within the page budget

Operating 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: Return a claim-evidence-risk ledger rather than a prose-only diagnosis; every recommendation must point to a manuscript location or missing artifact.
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

【Mode】empirical / formal / normative
【Core argument】one sentence
【Mechanism / comparative statics】the engine of the claim
【Observable implications】the falsifiable predictions
【Innovation】what changes for the general reader
【Next】jop-research-design

Supplementary resources

../../resources/external_tools.md — formal-modeling and simulation tooling
../../resources/official-source-map.md — JOP scope ("theoretically innovative," broad on method)