The Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership at the Hobby School of Public Affairs is pleased to announce this year’s winner and first runner-up of the 2024 Elizabeth D. Rockwell Prize for Best Article on Ethics, Leadership, and Public Policy. The EDR Prize recognizes scholars for original high-quality research that contributes to ethical policymaking and policy reform. All articles published in the three years preceding the award date are eligible for the prize.

2024 Winner

Johanna Thoma, “Social Science, Policy and Democracy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 52, 1 (2024): 5-41.

Social scientists invariably make value-laden judgments in constructing indices to measure inflation, the cost of living, poverty, well-being, human development, health, and other social phenomena. These indices often influence economic, political, and social policymaking even though they reflect the value judgments of a small subset of elites rather than popular opinions. Some philosophers have suggested that this democratic deficit can be overcome by enabling more popular input into the values that inform social sciences indices but Thoma argues in this article for abandoning the goal of creating a single index altogether in favor of pluralistic indices that make transparent the different concerns of different groups and persons. Only so, she argues, diverse groups and persons can engage in debates about the aims of policy on the same statistical grounds that social scientists and policymakers use to justify their views.   

The Prize Committee noted the importance of Thoma’s research question and was impressed by the thoroughness and originality of her response to it. The article should be essential reading for all public policy students as well as philosophers and others interested in democratic decision making and the role of social sciences in good government.

 Johanna Thoma is Professor for Ethics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany.

2024 First Runner-up

Mollie Gerver, Patrick Lown, and Dominik Duell, “Proportional Immigration Enforcement,” The Journal of Politics, 85, 3 (2023): 949-968.

In discussing the ethics of immigration policy, political philosophers usually focus on broad questions about the justifiability of states’ excluding migrants or supporting open borders. Less attention has been given to the ethics of policy strategies for preventing immigration. Gerver, Lown, and Duell take up this topic arguing that the states are only justified in using strategies to prevent immigration that are proportionate to the harms they are attempting to avert and identifying factors such as whether migrants were forced to migrate or not as crucial for assessing proportionality. Formulating their theoretical argument into nine hypotheses, they then test whether a representative sample of adults in the United Kingdom and United States concur with their proportional harm argument and find support for it.

The Elizabeth D. Rockwell Prize Committee appreciated the author’s unique intervention into the immigration debate and learned a lot from their careful analysis of proportionate responses to immigration under different conditions. The article offers a model for combining high level philosophical with empirical research to an important policy issue.

Mollie Gerver is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London; Patrick Lown is a research fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Essex; and Dominik Duell is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.