James Q Wilson
Biographic Data
| ID | 117149 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Q Wilson |
| GIVEN NAMES | James Q |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilson |
| SIGNATURE | WILSON J Q |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 85 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 462 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 85 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1960 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Ventanas rotas. La policía y la seguridad en los barrios
Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo.
Understanding and Controlling Crime: Toward a New Research Strategy
Crime and public policy
Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities, With a New Preface by the Author
Pat Moynihan Thinks about Families
Daniel Patrick Moynihan; The Negro Family; race; single-parent families; welfare
In Defense of Huntington
Fouad Ajami, Richard Betts, George Borjas, Stephen Bosworth, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Michael Glennon, Mariano Grondona, Lawrence Harrison, Robert D. Kaplan, Richard Lamm, David Landes, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Minxin Pei, Lucian Pye, Stephen Rosen, Peter Skerry, Tony Smith, James Q. Wilson, Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of Huntington, Foreign Policy, No. 145 (Nov. - Dec., 2004), pp. 4+6+8-10
Imputing a biological impetus to society
The New Normativity: The Abuse Excuse and the Resurgence of Judgment in the Criminal Law
This article reviews Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System? by James Q. Wilson (1997). There is growing interest within the academy in reviving the "normative" in criminal law scholarship. Enter a recent book, Moral Judgment, by the distinguished criminologist James Q. Wilson. Professor Wilson's work prompts the question: What is meant by the term ''judgment"? Considering three different models--judgment as community, ju…
Idealizing politics
Donald A. Wittman's Myth of Democratic Failure attempts to show that government is more rational than is often believed. For instance, Wittman argues that voters are tolerably well informed and that politicians are responsive to the voters’ will. Unfortunately, Wittman's argument proceeds at the level of economic theory, which is often contradicted by empirical reality (and by non‐economic theories that take account of political reality). It is n…
Revising the guidelines for inclusion
Political Organizations: Updated Edition
The humanities, in memoriam
Robert Conquest: Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California A century ago, Matthew Arnold in t roduced into c o m m o n English usage the word Philistine. He characterized the Philistine as ~a strong, dogged opponen t o f the chosen people, of the children of light. But we should r e m e m b e r that Israel's early troubles weren ' t always f rom this straightforward foe. O n the o ther flank lay a more insidious ene…
The Moral Sense
Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945-1990 by Kim McQuaid
Businessmen are politicians in America, writes Kim McQuaid, politicians are businessmen. Today, in areas as diverse as home mortgages, high technology, and Smart Bombs, the private and public sectors are working together to perform tasks that each is unable to do alone. In Uneasy Partners McQuaid surveys the close ties that have formed between big business and government in the period from World War II to the present. Government needs business, M…
Wealth and happiness
In The Market Experience, Robert Lane restates the central criticism of economic views of human satisfaction—namely, that they define welfare as utility and, in practice if not in theory, use money as the measure of utility, while in reality utility (or welfare) ought to be defined as happiness. In exploring the implications of this noneconomic definition for our assessment of markets, Lane summarizes the evidence about how people assess their ow…
Reinventing Public Administration
This award has a special meaning for me. When I was an undergraduate the University of Redlands and later a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I took courses on public administration. They had the same soporific effect on me as a speech by the vice-president. Any vice-president. I resolved early that I would be willing to teach or study almost any subject except public administration. I was reinforced in
The Moral Sense
Are human beings naturally endowed with a conscience? Or is morality artificilly acquired through social pressure and instruction? Most people assume that modern science proves the latter. Further, most of our current social policies are vbased upon this view of the sources of morality. Here, however, the author seeks to reconcile traditional ideas with a range of important empiracl research into the sources of human behaviour over the last 50 ye…
The drama of the college wars
The Moral Sense
The central problem for social science is to explain social order. How do people manage to live together? One can discern two ways of answering that question. The first view is normative and communal: people learn from their culture customs that provide an internal compass guiding them to act in ways that minimize conflict and ensure comity. The second view is rationalistic and individualistic: order is created by explicit and implicit agreements…
How Useful Is "Bureaucracy": A Review Essay
Crime, race, and values
Drugs and Crime
Drugs and Crime
Bureaucracy and Governance
Juridical Democracy versus American Democracy
T he End of Liberalism by Theodore Lowi was and is an important book, large in conception, bold in execution, and substantial in influence. It is a provocative and influential statement of some of the problems of pluralism, or “interest-group liberalism.” One of those problems is the inadequately constrained delegation of legislative problems to administrative agencies, leading to “the atrophy of institutions of popular control” (p. 86). The atro…
Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior
Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as "subcultures" constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of "the public interest" or the "welfare of the community." …
The Moral Sense
The central problem for social science is to explain social order. How do people manage to live together? One can discern two ways of answering that question. The first view is normative and communal: people learn from their culture customs that provide an internal compass guiding them to act in ways that minimize conflict and ensure comity. The second view is rationalistic and individualistic: order is created by explicit and implicit agreements…
The Effect of the Police on Crime
The effect of police practices on the rate of robbery in 35 large American cities is estimated by a set of simultaneous equations. The measures of police resources (patrol units on the street) and police activity on the street (moving citations issued) are more precise than anything thus far available in studies of this kind and permit the use of identification restrictions that allow stronger inferences about the causal effect of arrests on crim…
Political Ethos Revisited
An effort to test the existence and correlates of the "unitarist" and "individualist" political ethos (first discussed in City Politics under the labels "middle-class Anglo-Saxon ethos" and "immigrant ethos") in a sample of 1,059 mostly male Boston homeowners reveals that about one fifth of the respondents have one or the other ethos when defined by two sets of attitudes and about one eighth have one or the other when defined by three sets of att…
The strategy of protest: Problems of Negro Civic Action
The logical and empirical elements of bargaining are receiving increased attention as the effort proceeds to fashion an analytical tool useful for better understanding the nature of controversy. In many of these discussions, the focus has been on those who enter into the bargaining relationship out of either necessity or hope of gain (4, 9). The notion of bargaining is simplified if one assumes that the need for or desirability of bargaining is g…
The Economy of Patronage
A Longitudinal Study of the Effect of Race on Sentencing
Data covering a ten-year period in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are used to estimate the effect of race and other variables on sentences given to persons charged with armed robbery and burglary. Longitudinal data, coupled with interviews of participants, are used to overcome problems of sample selection bias usually associated with cross-sectional studies of the determinants of sentencing. The research shows that race had a clear effect on both the deci…
Thinking about crime
As crime rates inexorably rose during the tumultuous years of the 1970s, disputes over how to handle the violence sweeping the nation quickly escalated. James Q. Wilson redefined the public debate by offering a brilliant and provocative new argument--that criminal activity is largely rational and shaped by the rewards and penalties it offers--and forever changed the way Americans think about crime. Now with a new foreword by the prominent scholar…
Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership
Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945-1990 by Kim McQuaid
Businessmen are politicians in America, writes Kim McQuaid, politicians are businessmen. Today, in areas as diverse as home mortgages, high technology, and Smart Bombs, the private and public sectors are working together to perform tasks that each is unable to do alone. In Uneasy Partners McQuaid surveys the close ties that have formed between big business and government in the period from World War II to the present. Government needs business, M…
Patronage in New York State, 1955-1959
When Averell Harriman became Governor of New York on January 1, 1955, the Democrats assumed power in Albany for the first time in twelve years. With Harriman came his newly appointed Secretary of State, Carmine G. De Sapio, leader of Tammany Hall, Democratic National Committeeman, and widely described as the architect of the Democratic resurgence. Harriman, however, had only barely won the election, and such unity as the party had achieved during…
The Negro Leadership Class
Pat Moynihan Thinks about Families
Daniel Patrick Moynihan; The Negro Family; race; single-parent families; welfare
Crime, race, and values
The Metropolitan Enigma: "Inquiries into the Nature and Dimensions of America's "Urban Crisis
Throwing Down the Gauntlet: A Challenge to the Relevance of Sociology for the Etiology of Criminal Behavior
Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities
Reinventing Public Administration
This award has a special meaning for me. When I was an undergraduate the University of Redlands and later a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I took courses on public administration. They had the same soporific effect on me as a speech by the vice-president. Any vice-president. I resolved early that I would be willing to teach or study almost any subject except public administration. I was reinforced in
Drugs and Crime
The Effects of the Police On Crime: A Response to Jacob and Rich
In an earlier article in this Review, we argued, on the basis of a cross-sectional study of 35 large American cities, that as the proportion of robberies resulting in arrest rises, the rate at which robberies are committed falls (Wilson and Boland, 1978). By estimating a set of simultaneous equations, we suggested that this negative association between arrest rates and robbery rates was evidence of the deterrent effect of arrests on robberies. Mo…
Thinking about Crime
Generational and Ethnic Differences Among Career Police Officers
Despite their small proportion of the city's population, second-generation Irish continue to be found in large numbers as tall age levels among the sergeants of one large city's police department. There is no direct evidence that Irish over-representation among sergeants is the result of favoritism; there is some evidence that the Irish are unlike "American" and "European" officers in the attitudes they have toward police work and its rewards and…
The Amateur Democrat in American Politics
THE AMATEUR DEMOCRAT IN AMERICAN POLITICS Get access James Q. Wilson James Q. Wilson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume XVI, Issue 1, September 1962, Pages 73–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a053964 Published: 01 September 1962
Ventanas rotas. La policía y la seguridad en los barrios
Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo.
Idealizing politics
Donald A. Wittman's Myth of Democratic Failure attempts to show that government is more rational than is often believed. For instance, Wittman argues that voters are tolerably well informed and that politicians are responsive to the voters’ will. Unfortunately, Wittman's argument proceeds at the level of economic theory, which is often contradicted by empirical reality (and by non‐economic theories that take account of political reality). It is n…
Governing New York City. Wallace S. Sayre , Herbert Kaufman
The Study of Politics: The Present State of American Political Science. Charles S. Hyneman
The Congressional Party: A Case Study. David B. Truman
The Economy of Patronage
The Politics of Nonpartisanship: A Study of California City Elections. Eugene C. Lee
The strategy of protest: Problems of Negro Civic Action
The logical and empirical elements of bargaining are receiving increased attention as the effort proceeds to fashion an analytical tool useful for better understanding the nature of controversy. In many of these discussions, the focus has been on those who enter into the bargaining relationship out of either necessity or hope of gain (4, 9). The notion of bargaining is simplified if one assumes that the need for or desirability of bargaining is g…
Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership
The Amateur Democrat
Governments: The Political Economy of the New York Metropolitan Region. Robert C. Wood
Negro Leadership in a Southern City. M. Elaine Burgess
The Amateur Democrat in American Politics
THE AMATEUR DEMOCRAT IN AMERICAN POLITICS Get access James Q. Wilson James Q. Wilson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Parliamentary Affairs, Volume XVI, Issue 1, September 1962, Pages 73–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.pa.a053964 Published: 01 September 1962
Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership.Alex Gottfried
Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics.Seymour Martin Lipset
The Negro Leadership Class
The Amateur Democrat
City Politics
Political Form and Metropolitan Reform
City Politics
Patronage in New York State, 1955-1959
When Averell Harriman became Governor of New York on January 1, 1955, the Democrats assumed power in Albany for the first time in twelve years. With Harriman came his newly appointed Secretary of State, Carmine G. De Sapio, leader of Tammany Hall, Democratic National Committeeman, and widely described as the architect of the Democratic resurgence. Harriman, however, had only barely won the election, and such unity as the party had achieved during…
Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior
Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as "subcultures" constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of "the public interest" or the "welfare of the community." …
Generational and Ethnic Differences Among Career Police Officers
Despite their small proportion of the city's population, second-generation Irish continue to be found in large numbers as tall age levels among the sergeants of one large city's police department. There is no direct evidence that Irish over-representation among sergeants is the result of favoritism; there is some evidence that the Irish are unlike "American" and "European" officers in the attitudes they have toward police work and its rewards and…
City Politics
Necessity versus the Devil
Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law and Order in Eight Communities
Dilemmas of Police Administration
POLICY MAKING FOR THE POLICE is complicated by the fact that, at least in large cities, the police department is an organization with at least two objectives, one of which produces conflict and the other of which cannot be attained.' The dilemmas facing police administrators arise out of their inability to obtain agreement on what constitutes satisfactory performance of the first objective, and their difficulty in finding a strategy which would p…
Political science (66 works) · Sociology (51 works) · Law (49 works) · Criminology (29 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (24 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (16 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works)