It is an official journal of the American Political Science Association and is published on their behalf by Cambridge University Press.

APSR was established in 1906 and is the flagship journal in political science.

[1][2][3] The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, Current Contents / Social & Behavioral Sciences, International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and the International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature and Social Sciences.

[4] The first three managing editors were W. W. Willoughby (1906–1916), John A. Fairlie (1917–1925) and Frederic A. Ogg (1926–1949).

[5][6][7] For the 2020–2024 term, the journal is co-led[8] by a 12 member editorial team of Sharon Wright Austin, Michelle Dion, Celeste Montoya, Clarissa Rile Hayward, Kelly Kadera, Julie Novkov, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Dara Strolovitch, Aili M. Tripp, Denise Walsh, S. Laurel Weldon, and Elisabeth Jean Wood.