ABSTRACT
The first issue of West European Politics (WEP) was published in February 1978 under the joint editorship of Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright. The journal had been initially conceived when both editors were lecturing at the London School of Economics, where they were jointly responsible for a new MSc degree in West European politics. At that time, the range of journals dealing with comparative European politics was considerably more limited than is now the case. The standard national political science journals, including American Political Science Review and Political Studies, were well established, but usually included only a small number of comparative European papers. The same was true even for the more explicitly comparative journals, including the US-based Comparative Politics and Comparative Political Studies, both founded in 1968, and World Politics. Moreover, almost none of these journals paid much attention to the politics of the smaller European democracies, which was to become a particular concern of WEP. The smaller democracies also tended to be sidelined by the two leading journals in European politics at the time. The Journal of Common Market Studies, founded in 1963, was devoted almost exclusively to the study of European integration, while the European Journal of Political Research, launched in 1973 as the official journal of the newly-established European Consortium for Political Research, tended primarily towards quantitative and cross-national studies. For WEP, what mattered was a more conventional, case-oriented comparative politics that would cover the small as well as the large democracies – ranging across the whole of what was then Western Europe.
