U dunno if he has rnr ... And top journals take years to publish in..
Not really. Review time tends to be negatively correlated with journal ranking in poli sci. Top general and subfield journals operate smoothly and fairly quickly. The second and third tiers... not so much.
Perhaps if a paper gets into a vicious revise-and-resubmit cycle, but regardless that is just one paper. Obviously after Harvard and two years at Nuffield we'd assume a candidate has at least 4 publication-ready papers. The chances of them all landing in r&r hell is vanishingly small. The simpler explanation is yet another Harvard grad who can't really produce.
this entire thread is nonsense, but this is the most nonsense of them all.
first off, getting tenure at stanford in expectation means publishing some combination of a top-press book, a set of N top articles, and a handful of other published pieces. obviously the more the better, but quality is weighted over quantity. one consequence is there are incentives to take longer on important pieces to increase the chances these land at the top.
another consequence is incentives to always submit work at the top journal and work down, instead of targeting out the gate. and working through this top track can take years. e.g. APSR 1st reviews can take 4 to 6 months, AJPS around 3 to 5 months, and JOP 3 to 5 months. let's say you get rejected at APSR and AJPS after 8 to 10 months of reviews plus intervening revisions, then you get a R&R at JOP after 3 months of 1st reviews. You revise in 4 to 6 weeks, then resubmit and wait another 2.5 months for a decision. thus add on another 3 to 4 months before an acceptance. that's a year+ from first submission to a decision, and this is an fairly optimistic case. i've had papers go from a R&R at top-3, rejected after 2+ years there in review and multiple R&Rs, to rejections at the 5 next journals, for an acceptance after more than 4 years in review.
and books take years, including at least a year in review. so unless you submitted your work in grad school (which can be risky, e.g., you miss all the major feedback you get from the job search and later), then it's easy to see how 2 to 3 years you haven't published too much.
obviously point is wait until year 3 of tenure-track when progress has to first be demonstrated to begin to judge a record.
Her CV is nearly unchanged from the summer of 2016 when she went on the market. 2014 JOP with undergrad advisor, some non peer-reviewed filler that doesn't count toward tenure, some working papers listed but only abstracts available, and a job market paper that isn't even at R&R stage 3 years later, so it must have been rejected at both APSR and AJPS at this point, possibly at JOP too. That's not a good sign. As the other poster said, the chances of an R&R hell are small, and that could happen to one paper. But there are no new finished working papers in the pipeline. All she did was some brief policy reports about India. I think at this point she realizes she won't be able to publish in top journals to get tenure, but she'll try to squeeze 12 years out of Stanford KLJ-style before taking a job writing policy reports for some NGO. Her quant skills are too weak for FB.