From jop-skills
Guides turning political science ideas into theoretically innovative arguments for The Journal of Politics (JOP). Covers formal, empirical, and normative modes with falsifiable implications and JOP's innovation test.
How this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/jop-skills:jop-theory-buildingThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
JOP advertises that it publishes **theoretically innovative** work and treats theory **broadly** —
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.
jop-research-design).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.
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.
jop-research-design)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.
claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.【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
../../resources/external_tools.md — formal-modeling and simulation tooling../../resources/official-source-map.md — JOP scope ("theoretically innovative," broad on method)npx claudepluginhub brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills --plugin jop-skillsBuilds testable theoretical arguments for AJPS manuscripts, covering empirical mechanisms, formal models, or measurement-driven approaches. Structures hypotheses, mechanisms, and scope conditions for empirical confrontation.
Structures a political science finding into a portable theoretical argument with explicit mechanisms, scope conditions, and observable implications. Useful when a paper has strong empirics but a weak 'so what' or is called 'atheoretical'.
Structures the theoretical argument of an APSR manuscript into a discipline-level contribution by defining concepts, mechanisms, observable implications, and scope conditions.