How to Write a Conference Proposal

APSA proposal season is upon us, so I thought I would take some time to consider how to write a conference proposal.  There is a lot of mystery around the process of how to write a proposal that actually gets accepted.  I cannot say that I have mastered it myself, but I can at least share with you some of the secrets of crafting a proposal that is more likely to get accepted.

Roughly speaking, this is how the process works (at least for conferences like APSA, MPSA, WPSA, SPSA – APT is a little different):

• People submit a combination of paper proposals and panel proposals through websites to specific sections at the conference.
• The section chair receives all of the proposals at once sometime AFTER the deadline has passed.  [In other words, there is no advantage to submitting early.]
• The section chair has a set number of panels for her section.
• The section chair then fills those panel slots through a combination of accepting panel proposals, and crafting panels from individual paper proposals.

The acceptance rate varies tremendously from one conference to the next, and from one section to the next.  For the Foundations of Political Thought section at APSA, the acceptance rate is somewhere around 18%.  When I chaired the Political Philosophy:  Approaches and Themes section at MPSA in 2007, the acceptance rate was close to 100%.

This leads us to the Golden Rule of Conference Proposals:

The more selective the section,

the more you need to think like a section chair

in order to write a successful proposal.

So let’s take a trip into the mind of a section chair.  Section chairs for larger conferences will receive hundreds of proposals.  Reading these can become mind-numbingly dull.  Making decisions about which great proposals to accept and which great proposals to reject can be excruciating.  Here are the kinds of questions a section chair might ask while looking at these proposals:

• Do I get what this paper/panel is about?  If I cannot understand the proposal, then I have to wonder whether the author will be able to write a paper or give a presentation that will make sense to the audience.

• Is there an audience for this paper/panel?  One of the best kept secrets of conferences is that attendance at panels matters.  Sections often are allocated panel slots based on attendance at panels in the previous year.  So section chairs consider which papers and panels will be interesting to the kind of theorists who typically attend that conference.  They want to accept proposals that will attract numbers.

• Which proposals make my job easier?  Remember that section chairs are often considering hundreds of proposals.  This is a TON of work in and of itself, just reading and evaluating the different papers and panels.  It takes even more work to try to cobble together a panel from the hundreds of individual paper proposals, and then to try to cajole friends into chairing and discussing.  Section chairs are often more likely to accept a panel proposal than a paper proposal for the simple reason that it saves them the hassle of having to put together a panel themselves.

All that said, there are section chairs who adopt decision rules to make their jobs easier, and you simply cannot predict who will adopt which rules.  Some will rule out individual paper proposals by graduate students; others will make it a point to include graduate students on the program.  Some will only consider panel proposals; others will make it a point to make room for panels that they put together.  Some will leave panel proposals untouched – the panel gets accepted or rejected as a whole; others will break up panel proposals to reject weak papers, to add in individual paper proposals that fit with the panel, or to create new panels that they think will be even better.   There’s no way to predict how a section chair will make these kinds of calls in advance – so don’t write your proposal with these kinds of issues in mind.  Just focus on the three questions above.

So, given what the mind of a section chair is like in general, here are some tips for writing conference proposals:

• Write clearly.  Do not use unnecessary jargon.  Your ideas need to come across quickly to someone who is reading through hundreds and hundreds of proposals.
• Write succinctly.  Sometimes the conference websites enforce a word or character limit, which is great because it forces proposals to be short.  But where the limit is not enforced by technology, you should enforce it for yourself.  A proposal that rambles on suggests an author who will submit a 70-page manifesto to her discussant and won’t be able to stick to a 12-minute presentation.  Shorter is better.
• Write confidently.  Proposals are due so far in advance of the actual conference that you may not know yet what you will actually conclude, and you may not even be certain of the texts or questions you will be writing about.  That’s okay.  Write as if you are 100% certain of what you are doing.
• Motivate the section chair to care about your paper.  Explain in your proposal why people should care about reopening a debate about the place of some obscure text that interests you.  Tell why the issue/author/book/policy matters.  This will help the section chair to see your proposal as one that could attract an audience.
• Propose a panel.  Try to organize a full panel, instead of just proposing a paper.  Your proposal is more likely to be accepted, and it is also a chance for you to expand your network.
• Choose the sections you submit to carefully.  You usually have the choice of submitting to two sections.  You can learn which sections are most likely to be appropriate for your proposal by looking at past conference programs online.  [One of the most common mistakes I see from younger theorists is when they idealistically submit their proposals to sections in comparative, IR, or American, thinking (rightly) that their work is relevant to those fields, but actually making it extremely unlikely that they will get accepted.  When possible, submit only to theory sections and sections that have a clear track record of accepting theory proposals.]

Lastly, a few words for graduate students:

• Do not propose a dissertation prospectus.  A prospectus makes for a really terrible conference paper.  It is a proposal, not yet an argument.

• Especially if you are early in the dissertation process (i.e. you have completed two or fewer chapters), I recommend that you only submit paper proposals for papers you have already written.  It may be tempting to propose the chapter you plan to write in the next few months.  But until you have more experience at conferences, I recommend that you stick with papers that are more polished and have had a round of feedback from your committee.  You will be more likely to give a good presentation, and to get helpful feedback from your discussant and audience when your work is more finished than preliminary.

 

If any of you have other thoughts on the proposal process, please email me or leave comments here!  I’m curious to hear what your experience has been, and what you would advise.