Is a paper more likely to be accepted if one of the authors is an associate editor for the journal? I'm about to submit my first scholarly manuscript to the top journal in my field, which has an acceptance rate of 20-25%. One of the co-authors on my paper, besides being generally well-known in this field, happens to be on the editorial board of this journal as an associate editor. Obviously I imagine that he'll automatically be excluded from the review process due to conflict of interest, but does their affiliation with the journal increase the chance of the paper getting accepted?  I should note that the paper has already been through several rounds of internal revision and I've received excellent feedback so far from both this particular coauthor and others.
In principle, no.

In actuality? It likely does, under a couple of different mechanisms:


An editor might be slightly more likely to give your paper the "benefit of the doubt" if its a borderline case between Revise/Reject, etc. This may also be true if your co-authors are "known" names, regardless of their editorial position.
An AE at a journal likely has extensive experience writing for, and reviewing, papers in that journal. As such, they probably have a good sense what kind of papers they're looking for, the tone they should be written in, etc.


So the answer, in a practical sense, is likely "Yes, but not by a huge amount." And possibly not after controlling for recognition and experience.