James Quinn Wilson (May 27, 1931 – March 2, 2012) was an American political scientist and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985-1990), and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT.
He was the former president of the American Political Science Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and Human Rights Foundation. He also was a co-author of a leading university textbook, American Government, and wrote many scholarly books and articles, and op-ed essays. He gained national attention for a 1982 article introducing the broken windows theory in The Atlantic. In 2003, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.