Johanna Thoma, professor of ethics at the University of Bayreuth, is the winner of the 2024 Elizabeth D. Rockwell Prize for Best Article on Ethics, Leadership and Public Policy.
The Rockwell Prize “recognizes scholars for original high-quality research that contributes to ethical policymaking and policy reform.”
Professor Thoma was awarded the prize for her article, “Social Science, Policy and Democracy,” which was published this year in Philosophy & Public Affairs (vol. 52, no. 1). The prize announcement included a summary of the article:
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 wrote: “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.”
The Rockwell Prize, which includes $10,000, is awarded by the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.
First runners-up for the award were Mollie Gerver (King’s College London), Patrick Lown (University of Essex), and Dominik Duell (University of Innsbruck) for their “Proportional Immigration Enforcement,” which was published last year in The Journal of Politics (vol. 85, no. 3).
Further information about the prize is here.
