Ambitious title, no? Hehe, it should be if you want to get your paper noticed and invited for a conference.
Let me start by saying that the advice given stems from my experience in the social sciences. In other fields, they actually require you to submit the entire paper in advance! Yes, my dear political scientists, it seems that you can’t just make some lofty promises like providing enough evidence to challenge some 30 years of research on the topic, add a few fashionable catchphrases, trim the text down to 250 words, click the ‘send’ button and enjoy an acceptance mail a few weeks later. I guess it also spares you the few sleepless nights before the deadline for submitting the actual paper most of which are spent pondering over the question ‘What the hell was I thinking when I wrote this abstract?’ and convincing yourself that ‘everyone does it’; embellishing abstracts, I mean.
So, how to get the perfect social science abstract?
The opening sentence: start by stating the conventional wisdom on the topic or in your field. The favorite punch-bag is indeed some theory/proposition/analytical framework that has been around for some time, so much in fact, that most sane academics are anyway convinced that it is obsolete or inadequate. Nevertheless, you should present it is a highly regarded one and promise to challenge it both theoretically and empirically (or, normatively if you are writing a theoretical paper). Something along the lines of:
Most scholars agree that European Union’s capacity to speak with one voice in Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and become a powerful international actor is tightly constrained by the intergovernmental structure of cooperation in this field. However, recent developments in CFSP show that the EU is capable of agreeing on a common position despite the difficulties involved in coordinating 27 national positions and in the need to reach unanimity. This paper argues that institutional hurdles can be overcome in the presence of a supranational policy entrepreneur such as the High Representative for CFSP.
Next step: evidence. After these very promising sentences, you need to mention how you intend to prove your hopefully carefully chosen challenge to the mainstream theory. By ‘carefully chosen’ I mean one which is so broad that you are bound to find a case supporting it if you look hard enough (well, it’s better that you do not have to search so hard: you will have to argue in the paper why this case is significant beyond its obvious merit of confirming your theory). The best case is one that sounds important but is yet obscure enough so that most people do not know the details of it. In EU studies, your best bet would be a new member state: they are always under-researched and besides, you can only get meaningful information about them if you know the language. Given that this is not very likely to be the case unless you are a native speaker (I mean, come on, do they really teach Slovak at your school in Greece?) you are in a good position even if not a very likely one. In case you only speak English (i.e. you are British or American) then try to focus on some regional development in the city/municipality/region you are from. Or country, if you are from Scotland. Something like:
The paper focuses on the case of (…) and demonstrates the crucial role of the High Representative who acted as a policy entrepreneur and fostered a common EU approach despite the differences among member states.
You can make this section longer if you already have some evidence, especially ‘expert’ interviews. Interviews seem to have become such a highly respected – and exclusive — way of collecting evidence that ridiculous statements such as ‘The role of Mr. X in achieving a compromise was crucial (Interview, Mr. X)’ are becoming commonplace. Thus, add ‘on the basis of a number of expert interviews’, or, if you don’t have these, substitute with ‘primary and secondary sources’.
Step three: your contribution. Here is the part where modesty suddenly becomes a virtue. You do not want to be thought of as a pompous hmmmm person or an ignorant who does not seem to know that completely rejecting a theory by presenting an obscure case is a highly reprehensible- if, sadly, highly fashionable – thing to do. You must offer some alternative explanations but also show awareness of their limitations and suggest that your results are potentially so significant that their robustness has to be tested in other cases. Thus, add the following:
The study derives a number of conditions under which supranational policy entrepreneurs in this field can be expected to succeed in fostering a particular policy outcome.
By now, you should have around 160 words or so. Read again the title of the panel and its description. Add a sentence to demonstrate how your paper relates to it. I know it doesn’t and I know you just want to have it accepted because the conference takes place in a nice hotel in a lovely city but just try. Let’s say, your panel is on ‘The EU as a Global Actor: Opportunities and Limitations’. You can add the following:
The paper thus demonstrates that while the presence of policy entrepreneurs can significantly increase the EU’s ability to assert itself on the international stage these entrepreneurs can only be effective under certain conditions which have to be taken into account when assessing the EU’s potential as a global actor.
Now, a catchy title. If you are not feeling particularly inspired, then just take a title of a paper or a book that everyone knows and play with it. For example, the capability-expectations gap. For those who do not know what this refers to: shame on you! Still, I will be nice and save you the effort to google it: it is basically the gap between the EU’s practical capabilities to act and the expectations of how it should act. The original title of the article where this insight, which has provided the analytical framework for – OK, I will be nice here — many CFSP studies, was first published is Christopher Hill’s ‘The Capability-Expectations Gap, or, Conceptualizing Europe’s International Role’ (here it is and you are welcome). So, your title can be: ‘Supranational Policy Entrepreneurs: Closing the Capability-Expectations Gap?’
Finally, the keywords: don’t forget them, they ensure that, if ever published in conference proceedings which is where most likely such paper may be (and should only be) published, you get many hits by poor desperate researchers who might even be enticed to read your abstract only to be faced with the harsh reality of an actual expectations-capability gap only 250 words later. So: keep the keywords general enough to get you into another panel in the unlikely event of this one not accepting your abstract. At the same time, add a few specific ones to make sure you will fit into your first-choice-panel’s topic. In this case, you can put the following keywords:
EU, supranational actors, policy entrepreneurs, CFSP, EU Global Actor
Proofread, convert to PDF (you don’t want your spelling mistakes to be underlined in red), write the mail, do not forget to attach the file, hit send and go to sleep. It’s 2 am after all, and the deadline was…well, yesterday.
Tags: abstract, conference, EU, paper, writing
August 22, 2009 at 3:11 am |
Well, true, even if a bit cynical. Especially true for those of us in the early stages of academic career. However, if you really want to make a solid contribution and deliver a paper everyone will be talking about you need a different strategy. By the way, there is literature on that written by the sociology of knowledge scholars. A good summary is in the last chapters of Paul Diesing’s “How Does Social Science Work?”
August 24, 2009 at 5:05 pm |
Thanks for the tip on Diesing, perhaps I will have a look at it once I finish my PhD. I don’t want distractions on the way! Of course we can talk about the philosophy of knowledge and science, and the paradigms, and Kuhn and all that. But this might be a matter of an article, not a blog. Anyway, what really bothers me is that there seems to be some structure/methodology whatever you want to call it that people just expect to see in your abstract and, subsequently, paper. I am not sure that this helps us advance knowledge or anything apart from our own careers and publications list. I know what you will say: these are the pre-conditions to fulfill to get to a stage where we will be able to make an actual contribution. Until then, I will stick to the model above. Works fine but it scares me sometimes that I will become so used to it to take it as the norm…..