Call for submissions for a special issue: Public Opinion and COVID-19 in Latin America

Editors: Gregory Love and Amy Erica Smith

The COVID-19 pandemic poses unprecedented challenges for governments, civil societies, publics and survey researchers across Latin America. From the perspective of survey methodology, social distancing and economic crisis demand creative solutions to old problems related to sampling design, question wording, and valid inference. From theoretical and policy perspectives, the pandemic gives new urgency to old questions, such as (but not limited to):

  • What strategies effectively encourage collective action and voluntary compliance with public efforts?
  • How do mass publics understand, evaluate, and respond to expertise and authority?
  • How can policymakers address the changing needs of informal sectors, under the structural constraints facing Latin American governments?
  • How do mass publics apportion responsibility and blame for aspects of policy performance?
  • Do publics view the crisis as primarily one of public health? Economic? Political? Or natural disaster? How does framing of the crisis affect evaluations and response?

RLOP is issuing a call for papers for a special peer-reviewed issue on public opinion and coronavirus in Latin America. This call will remain open until July 15, 2021.

What:

  • We are soliciting research papers and notes that address clearly formulated questions of immediate theoretical, empirical, or methodological significance.
  • Suggested length: 2500-5000 words for articles (maximum 10,000); 1500-3000 words for research notes (maximum 4000 and 3 tables/figures); no limit for online appendices.
  • Papers should be submitted to the journal’s portal (https://revistas.usal.es/index.php/1852-9003) in English, Spanish, or Portuguese; authors should clearly indicate that the submission is aimed at this special issue.
  • We aim to make the research immediatly accessible to public audiences in two ways.
    • Before final paper acceptance, we ask authors to write a 750-1100 word piece for public consumption (in any language of the journal). Authors may choose to submit those pieces to a variety of venues, such as newspapers; political science blogs (for instance, the Monkey Cage or Latinoamérica Análisis); or newsmagazines such as Americas Quarterly or outlets within the region.
    • Accepted manuscripts will be immediately published online in RLOP’s FirstView.

When:

  • Given the extraordinary and open-ended nature of the crisis, submissions will be accepted and peer reviewed at any time between the issuance of this call and July 15, 2021.
  • The aim is speedy publication of peer-reviewed work. The editors commit to a maximum five-week turnaround time for first reviews. Except under extraordinary circumstances, papers will go through no more than one round of revision and resubmission.
  • The final collection will be published in the special issue of RLOP in November 2021.