@politicalscience more promising articles to other journals. I am not saying this is likely to be the case. My point is more generally that one should not jump to conclusions based on a handful of numbers.
2) We do not know how exactly desk-reject decisions are made. The criteria for CPS submissions do read reasonable for qualitative research. https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/CPS On the plus side, the CPS editors said that they once did an audit study of their qual desk rejections. 4/