Duplicate Presentations in a Dual World: A Perspective from a Public Administration Political Scientist

W hen I first was asked to write this piece about "double conferencing," I immedi ately went to my vita. Looking at the evidence Nelson Dometrius presented introducing this symposium and placing myself on the degree year list, I found I was in the center of the controversy, having received my degree in 1998. Had I committed the crime of presenting the same paper at two conferences? I skimmed my CV, and yes, there it was: an identically titled paper at both a national and a section conference. Granted, this was the only one I could find on my CV, there was only a month between the two conferences, and we had made some changes based on feedback. However, there was more than enough overlap to place me among the group of violators. I thought about my almost 15 years in aca demia, from graduate school to the rank of as sociate professor. Had anyone ever discussed this with me? Had my mentors ever told me, "don't do this," in my years of training at Chapel Hill? While I do not recall anyone overtly and intentionally bringing this to my at tention, I do know that Cynthia J. Bowling, somewhere across my Auburn University six years of graduate school I unconsciously adopted the understand ing that each conference paper should be a dif ferent or unique product. However, from talking with others, I know that they did not receive the same impression. Many operate on the "get enough feedback to make your paper impervious to reviewers" philosophy. Others want to be seen at every conference to get their names and work known, even if it means pre senting the same or a slightly revised or refo cused paper more than once. I suspect that counting only papers with the same title as double conferencing vastly underestimates the practice. A title change fitting the next confer ence theme is all that is necessary to have a "new" paper, and many would find this action perfectly legitimate. Currently, both perspec tives seem to be held as conferencing norms in our profession. And, I must confess, my own thoughts have changed across the years-even in the past three months as I have been think ing about this question. Part of my task in this symposium is to pon der the issue from the perspective of a public administration scholar. Although some of my arguments may be applicable to any field in political science, I confess that after a decade as a publishing professor and as a scholar at the intercept of theory and practice, I have come to think that double conferencing is (es pecially) appropriate in public administration if presenters maintain their integrity and ethi cal intentions. Borrowing from Paul Appleby, public administration is different because government is politics ... and institutions, representation, policy processes and analysis, management and leadership, globalization, fed eralism and collaborative networks, and public service. In short, public administration must encompass both the theoretical aspects of most fields of political science and the practical na ture of governance. Very simply and perhaps most importantly, public administration re search must include both the academic and the practitioner. The uniqueness and complexity of this field may require norms of research pre sentation and publishing that are slightly differ ent from other areas of political science. For many presenters, taking the same papers to a large national conference and a subfield conference risks repeating them to overlapping panel and audience members. In contrast, pre senting a paper at the APSA and the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) con ferences will often yield quite different audi ences. Though many public administration academics will attend both, the ASPA audience adds a substantial number of practitioners to panel attendance. Further, panels occurring at the ASPA conference are divided into narrow subor even sub-sub-fields of public adminis tration. At the APSA conference the section panels often remain quite broad, especially in the smaller sections. Not only do the panels and audiences at the APSA and the ASPA conferences often differ significantly, but many public administration research papers need input from these multiple audiences before they are ready for journal submission. Take, for example, the burgeoning study of election administration. Since the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore, and the passage of the Help American Vote Act, election administration and implementation has become the focus of politicians, practitioners, and public administration scholars alike. The Auburn University MPA program, in conjunc tion with the National Election Center, offers the only national certification program in elec tion administration. Thus, our faculty regularly consult academic research on elections and a range of election officials from county clerks to members of the secretaries' of state offices.