Henry Farrell's recent post on Crooked Timber, The Political Economy of Academic Conferences, gives a behind-the-scenes account of why some submitted conference papers make it and others don't. Although he writes about APSA, I am sure much of this applies to other conferences as well.
I spent a fair chunk of time over the last few months working as chair for one of the divisions of the annual American Political Science Association’s annual meeting, which is being held this year in Washington DC. It was an eye-opener – I’d never understood how the decision-making process worked before; i.e. how decisions are made over which paper proposals are accepted or rejected. It was also somewhat startling to see how many good papers don’t end up being accepted through no fault of their own. If I had had the slots, I would have accepted twice as many papers for my division as I was able to – there were a number of very good paper proposals that ended up not being accepted due to reasons of space or fit. But there is also a political economy to the process of decision-making; if you understand it properly (I didn’t, prior to participating in the process), you can maximize your chances of getting a good proposal accepted.
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