Pevnick Wins Rockwell Prize

The Elizabeth D. Rockwell Center on Ethics and Leadership at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston has announced the winner and runner-up for its 2025 Prize for the Best Article on Ethics, Leadership, and Public Policy.

The Rockwell Prize is awarded for an article on “ethics and/or leadership and public policy” demonstrating “originality, scholarly excellence, [and] potential to impact our understanding of real-world ethics and/or leadership relating to public policy.”

The prize is $10,000, with a $2,500 prize for the runner-up.

The winner of the prize is Ryan Pevnick (Politics, New York University) for his “The Representation-Enabling Approach to Campaign Finance Reform“, published in Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs. Here’s the abstract of his paper:

There is broad disagreement about campaign finance reform, in part, because there is disagreement about the goals that should guide it. The most common approaches focus on the importance of preventing corruption or promoting equal opportunity for political influence. Unfortunately, such accounts tend not to be rooted in a deeper account of democratic theory that can effectively explain, and situate, these goals. This paper sketches an account of representative democracy’s appeal that can explain the importance of reducing corruption and promoting equal opportunity for political influence. Importantly, however, this explanation also implies the importance of broader considerations related to the effective functioning of the system of representation that are oftentimes ignored in debate about campaign finance (e.g., facilitating effective accountability, electoral selection, and voter competence). At least from the perspective of democratic theory, these additional goals—and not just worries about corruption or equal opportunity for political influence—should shape our evaluation of systems of campaign finance. The paper, then, develops a comprehensive framework for evaluating systems of campaign finance by connecting such evaluation to the underlying reasons that might lead one to accept representative democracy. 

The runners-up are Ben Jones (Public Policy, Penn State) and Désirée Lim (Philosophy, Penn State) for their “The Ethics of Defunding the Police“, published in Perspectives on Politics. Here’s the abstract:

Calls to defund the police gained prominence with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and take various forms. Depending on what will be defunded, the idea has attracted support from different parts of the political spectrum. The politicized nature of the debate often cuts short reflection on how best to assess proposals to defund the police. This article takes up that task. It begins by developing a typology of defund measures: abolitionist cuts, abolitionist reallocation, disaggregative cuts, and disaggregative reallocation. It then outlines a framework to evaluate policing and defund measures, drawing on criteria from the ethics of defensive force. Since policing relies on force, it faces a high justificatory bar and must satisfy the principles of just aim, proportionality, and necessity. The state should not fund unjustified forms of policing that violate those principles. Different violations, though, demand different policy responses.

You can learn more about the Rockwell Prize, including its past winners, here.