Undergraduate Essay Competition

UNDERGRADUATE ESSAY COMPETITION

We are pleased to announce the launch of our 2025 Undergraduate Essay Competition! The winner will be presented with a prize of £100 and the runner-up will receive a prize of £50 at our annual conference in November 2025.

The competition is open to all undergraduate students who have submitted a piece of assessed work which contributes to our understanding of parliaments or legislatures. The assessed work must be under 4,000 words (excluding bibliography and references). It does not have to be an essay in the traditional sense, nor an essay specifically from a specialist parliamentary studies module.

Entries will be judged on their originality, rigour, strength of analysis and contribution to our field. All entries will be short-listed by the PSA Parliaments team and the winners chosen by an expert judge.

To enter, lecturers must submit an essay on their students’ behalf by 5pm on Friday 11 July 2025. Please note that only one submission can be made per lecturer (or teaching assistant), who must be a member of the PSA and of the Specialist Group on Parliaments. Students can only be entered once per competition. Multiple entries can be made per institution, if all nominating academics are members of both the PSA and of the Specialist Group on Parliaments.

Entries should be anonymised and sent via email to Caroline Bhattacharya with the following information indicated in the email making the submission (if any of the following is not provided, the submission will not be accepted):

Title of the essay
Student name
Student contact email (if the student graduates this summer, please provide an email address that will work after graduation)
Word count of the essay (excluding bibliography and respective references)
Name of nominating academic

We are looking forward to your submissions!