Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Political Science,

#601

Ken Booth

#14352

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Ken Booth FBA is a British international relations theorist, and the former E. H. Carr Professor of the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. He has been a visiting researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada; and at Cambridge University. He is a former Chair, and the first President of the British International Studies Association. He was part of the editorial team of the Review of International Studies, and currently serves as both Academic Editor of the Lynne Rienner Critical Security Studies series and...

#602

Jean-Pierre Filiu

Jean-Pierre Filiu

#19521

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

Jean-Pierre Filiu is a French professor of Middle East studies at Sciences Po, Paris School of International Affairs, an orientalist and an arabist. Life and career Before joining Sciences Po in 2006, Jean-Pierre Filiu was a career-diplomat who served as a junior officer in Jordan and the US, before becoming the French Deputy Chief of Mission in Syria and in Tunisia . Filiu was also diplomatic adviser to the French minister of Interior , the minister of Defense and the Prime Minister . He was one of the ten independent experts that President François Hollande designated to contribute to th...

#603

Alex P. Schmid

#12621

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Alex Peter Schmid is a scholar in terrorism studies, who from 1999 to 2005 was Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. He is particularly known for his work on the definition of terrorism.

#604

David H. Rosenbloom

#28599

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

David H. Rosenbloom is a scholar in the field of Public Administration. He is the Distinguished Professor of Public Administration at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. An authority on issues related to administrative law and constitutional aspects of public sector personnel policies, Rosenbloom is known for his approach emphasizing understanding American public administration from the three perspectives associated with the constitutional separation of powers: law, politics and management. He advocates establishing "constitutional competence" as a basic s...

#605

Avi Bell

#14196

Overall Influence

Abraham Bell is an Israeli Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and at Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Law. Bell received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago, and his S.J.D. from Harvard. He interned in the office of Israeli Supreme Court judge Mishael Cheshin.

#606

James A. Thurber

James A. Thurber

#28465

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

James Allen Thurber is university distinguished professor of government and founder and former director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies and affiliate distinguished professor of public administration and policy at American University, Washington, D.C. He is author or editor of numerous books and more than 90 articles and chapters on Congress, the U.S. presidency, interest groups and lobbying, and campaigns and elections.

#607

Daniel Deudney

#16665

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Daniel Horace Deudney is an American political scientist and Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His published work is mainly in the fields of international relations and political theory, with an emphasis on geopolitics and republicanism.

#608

Lanhee Chen

#14200

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Lanhee Joseph Chen is an American policy advisor, attorney, and academic. Chen serves as the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution, director of domestic policy studies and lecturer in the public policy program at Stanford University, and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School.

#609

Derk Bodde

#18850

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Derk Bodde was an American sinologist and historian of China known for his pioneering work on the history of the Chinese legal system. Bodde received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1930. He spent six years studying in China on a fellowship. He earned a doctorate in Chinese Studies from the University of Leiden March 3, 1938. When the Fulbright scholarship program was initiated in 1948, Bodde was the first American recipient of a one-year fellowship, which he spent studying in Beijing.

#610

José Manuel Barroso

#13791

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

José Manuel Durão Barroso is a Portuguese politician, lobbyist and university teacher, he previously served as non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International. He previously served as the 11th president of the European Commission and the 115th prime minister of Portugal.

#611

Daniel J. Elazar

Daniel J. Elazar

#21210

Overall Influence

1934 - 1999 (65 years)

Daniel Judah Elazar was a political scientist known for his seminal studies of political culture of the US states. He was professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Temple University in Pennsylvania, and director of the Center for the Study of Federalism at Temple University and the founder and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

#612

Robert Denhardt

#24334

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert B. Denhardt, scholar and author, was born in Kentucky in 1942. He received his Ph.D. in Public Administration from the University of Kentucky in 1968. Denhardt is best known for his work in public administration theory and organizational behavior, especially leadership and organizational change. In The New Public Service: Serving, not Steering, he developed a new model of governance that stresses the need to engage citizens in governance of their communities.

#613

Achille Mbembe

#3403

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe , is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and public intellectual who is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory.

#614

John McCormick

#13934

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

John McCormick is Jean Monnet Chair of European Union Politics at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis , and was department chair from 2001 until 2008. He spent eight years working in the environmental movement before becoming an academic. His research and teaching interests have moved from environmental policy to comparative politics and the politics and policies of the European Union.

#615

Iain Dale

#9875

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Iain Dale is a British broadcaster, author and political commentator, and a former publisher and book retailer. He has been a blogger since 2002. In 2005, he became the first openly gay Conservative candidate to contest a parliamentary election. He was the publisher of the Total Politics magazine between 2008 and 2012, and the managing director of Biteback Publishing until May 2018. Since September 2010, he has hosted a regular discussion show on the radio station LBC. He was named Radio Presenter of the Year at the Arqiva Commercial Radio Awards in both 2013 and 2016.

#616

Shahryar Khan

#11511

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Shahryar Mohammad Khan is a former career Pakistan diplomat who became Foreign Secretary of Pakistan in 1990, and remained so until his retirement from service in 1994. He later served as United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Rwanda , and wrote the book Shallow Graves of Rwanda on his experiences on what Rwanda went through. Since August 1999, he has intermittently served as the chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board, and also served as the president of Asian Cricket Council in 2016.

#617

Simon Hix

#16577

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Simon Hix is a British political scientist, holder of the Stein Rokkan chair in comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence. He was also Harold Laski Professor of Political Science and pro-director for research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Hix is an expert in European Union politics, and the author of several books, including What's Wrong with the European Union and How to Fix It, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament with Abdul Noury and Gérard Roland, and The Political System of the European Union. He is also associate editor of ...

#618

Şerif Mardin

#11064

Overall Influence

1927 - 2017 (90 years)

Şerif Mardin was a prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker. In a 2008 publication, he was referred to as the "doyen of Turkish sociology." Early life and education He was born in Istanbul in 1927 as Ahmed Halil Şerif Arif Mardin. His father was Şemsettin Mardin, a Turkish ambassador. Şemsettin Mardin was a member of very long-established family and was uncle to Arif Mardin and Betul Mardin. Şerif Mardin's mother was Reya Mardin who was the daughter of Ahmet Cevdet, the founder of an Ottoman newspaper called İkdam. His ancestors claim direct lineage from Husain...

#619

Ferdinand A. Hermens

#26338

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Ferdinand A. Hermens was a German-American political scientist and economist. He was born in Nieheim, Kreis Höxter in Germany and he died in Rockville, MD . His major books "Democracy or Anarchy?" and "The Representative Republic" were translated into German, Italian and Hebrew. His most important contribution to the progress of political science was his analysis of the impact that electoral systems have in structuring party competition. Hermens advised U.S. Congressional committees on Presidential Election Procedure, the Judiciary and Divided Powers and Economic Policy, the U.S. governmen...

#620

Camilla Stivers

#32621

Overall Influence

Camilla Stivers is a scholar and professor of Public Administration who is also known for her contributions in the fields of Urban Studies and Public service. Known primarily for her influential work “Bureau Men, Settlement Women: Constructing Public Administration in the Progressive Era”, Stivers has been published frequently and consistently throughout the years, and is seen as somewhat of an icon in the field of Public Administration. Although partially retired, Stivers currently serves as a professor and lecturer at Cleveland State University.

#621

James David Barber

#19715

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

James David Barber was a political scientist whose book The Presidential Character made him famous for his classification of presidents through their worldviews. From 1977 to 1995, he taught political science at Duke University.

#622

Ahmet Davutoğlu

#17121

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Ahmet Davutoğlu is a Turkish academic, politician and former diplomat who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Turkey and Leader of the Justice and Development Party from 2014 to 2016. He previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2014 and chief advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from 2003 to 2009. He was elected as an AKP Member of Parliament for Konya in the 2011 general election and was reelected as an MP in both the June and November 2015 general elections. He resigned as Prime Minister on 22 May 2016.

#623

Manfred Steger

#9066

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

#624

Andrei Tsygankov

#19473

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Andrei Pavlovich Tsygankov is a Russian-born academic and author in the field of international relations at San Francisco State University. Early life and education Tsygankov received his Candidate of Sciences degree at Moscow State University in 1991 and after emigration a PhD from University of Southern California in 2000.

#625

James A. Robinson

James A. Robinson

#10597

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

#626

Olivier Roy

#23592

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Olivier Roy is a French political scientist, professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has published articles and books on secularisation and Islam including "Global Islam", and The Failure of Political Islam. He is known to have "a different view of radical Islam" than some other experts, seeing it as peripheral, Westernized and part of a radicalized and "virtual" rather than pious and "actual" Muslim community. More recently he has written on the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and the November 2015 Paris attacks.

#627

Angelo Codevilla

Angelo Codevilla

#19770

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

Angelo Maria Codevilla was an Italian-American professor of international relations at what is now the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He served as a U.S. Navy officer, a foreign service officer, and professional staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate. Codevilla's books and articles range from French and Italian politics to the thoughts of Machiavelli and Montesquieu to arms control, war, the technology of ballistic missile defenses, and a broad range of international topics. Articles by Codevilla have appeared in Commentary, Foreign Affairs, National Review, and The New Republic.

#628

W. Cleon Skousen

W. Cleon Skousen

#8043

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

Willard Cleon Skousen was an American conservative author with the John Birch Society and a faith-based conspiracy theorist. A notable anti-communist and supporter of the John Birch Society, Skousen's works involved a wide range of subjects including the Six-Day War, Mormon eschatology, New World Order conspiracies, and parenting. His most popular works are The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Naked Communist.

#629

Liesbet Hooghe

#27452

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Liesbet Hooghe is a Belgian political scientist, currently serving as the W. R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also a research fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. In a list of 400 top political scientists at Ph.D. granting institutions in the US, published in Political Science & Politics , she was ranked as the fifth most-cited woman scholar in political science.

#630

Chris Blattman

#20860

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Christopher Blattman is a Canadian-American economist and political scientist working on conflict, crime, and international development. He is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies and The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He is active on Twitter as well as an early blogger on international economics and politics. He is the author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, published by Viking Press in 2022.

#631

Seweryn Bialer

#23172

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Seweryn Bialer was a German-born American academic. He was emeritus professor of political science at Columbia University and an expert on the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and Poland. He was the Director of Columbia's Research Institute on International Change.

#632

Kees van der Pijl

#24187

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Kees van der Pijl is a Dutch political scientist who was professor of international relations at the University of Sussex. He is known for his critical approach to global political economy and has published, amongst others, Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War. Prism of Disaster , a trilogy on Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy ; Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq ; Transnational Classes and International Relations ; and The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class . He resigned his emeritus status at Sussex in 2019 after refusing to apologise for allegations that the Isr...

#633

Stephen Macedo

#18809

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Macedo is an American political scientist who serves as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he was the former director at the University Center for Human Values. Macedo served as the president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy from 2018 until 2021.

#634

Richard J. Samuels

#31464

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Richard J. Samuels is an American academic, political scientist, author, Japanologist, Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#635

Donald E. Stokes

#24773

Overall Influence

1927 - 1997 (70 years)

Donald E. Stokes was an American political scientist and dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Stokes was a founder of public opinion research, and a coauthor of the seminal book The American Voter.

#636

Hope Hicks

#4973

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (36 years)

Hope Charlotte Hicks is an American public relations executive and political advisor who served in President Donald Trump’s administration from 2017 to 2018 and 2020 to 2021. She served as White House director of strategic communications from January to September 2017, as White House communications director from 2017 to 2018, and returned to serve as a counselor to the president from 2020 to 2021.

#637

Andrew Young

#12377

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

Andrew Jackson Young Jr. is an American politician, diplomat, and activist. Beginning his career as a pastor, Young was an early leader in the civil rights movement, serving as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a close confidant to Martin Luther King Jr. Young later became active in politics, serving as a U.S. Congressman from Georgia, United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Carter Administration, and 55th Mayor of Atlanta. He was the first African American elected to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction, as well as one of the first tw...

#638

Vitaly Naumkin

#10645

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Vitaliy Vyacheslavovich Naumkin ; born 21 May 1945 Career Naumkin earned his PhD from Moscow State University in 1972, writing his dissertation on medieval Islamic theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. In 1980, he released a translation of al-Ghazali's work.

#639

Layna Mosley

#28053

Overall Influence

Layna Mosley is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She studies international relations, particularly the relationship between domestic politics and the global economy.

#640

Andreas Maislinger

Andreas Maislinger

#10797

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Andreas Maislinger is an Austrian historian and political scientist and founder and former chairman of the Austrian Service Abroad. He also is the founder of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award, the Braunau Contemporary History Days and the inventor of the idea of the House of Responsibility.

#641

Duncan McCargo

#11213

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

#642

Virginia Page Fortna

#18420

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Virginia Page Fortna is an American political scientist, a specialist in the study of peace negotiations. She is currently the Harold Brown Professor of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the 2010 Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association.

#643

Robert Garner

#4156

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Robert Garner is a British political scientist, political theorist, and intellectual historian. He is a Professor Emeritus in the politics department at the University of Leicester , where he has worked for much of his career. Before working at Leicester, he worked at the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham, and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Salford.

#644

Souphanouvong

#19198

Overall Influence

1909 - 1995 (86 years)

Prince Souphanouvong , nicknamed the Red Prince, was along with his half-brother Prince Souvanna Phouma and Prince Boun Oum of Champasak, one of the "Three Princes" who represented respectively the communist , neutralist and royalist political factions in Laos. He was the President of Laos from December 1975 to August 1991.

#645

Darren Hawkins

#34921

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Darren Hawkins is an American professor and the current chair of the department of Political Science at Brigham Young University. Hawkins has studied international conventions and international law. He has written many articles in this field.

#646

Robert J. Art

#24542

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Robert Jeffrey Art is Christian A. Herter Professor of International Relations at Brandeis University, and Fellow at MIT Center for International Studies. He subscribes to the theory of neorealism, which argues that force still underlies the power structure in the modern world. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a United States nonprofit think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.

#647

Emanuel Adler

#17385

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Emanuel Adler, is a Uruguayan professor of political science and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Toronto. He is also the editor of International Organization and an honorary professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.

#648

Carles Boix

#26220

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Carles Boix i Serra is a Catalan and American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, currently teaching at Princeton University. He is a leading scholar in empirical democratic theory and comparative political economy.

#649

Jenny Hocking

#21379

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jennifer Jane Hocking is an Australian historian, political scientist and biographer. She is the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow with the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University, Emeritus Professor at Monash University, and former Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Her work is in two key areas, counter-terrorism and Australian political biography. In both areas she explores Australian democratic practice, the relationship between the arms of government, and aspects of Australian political history. Her research into the life of former Aus...

#650

Mehdi Bazargan

#17718

Overall Influence

1907 - 1995 (88 years)

Mehdi Bazargan was an Iranian scholar, academic, long-time pro-democracy activist and head of Iran's interim government. One of the leading figures of Iranian Revolution of 1979, he was appointed prime minister in February 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, making him Iran's first prime minister after the revolution. He resigned his position in November of the same year, in protest at the US Embassy takeover and as an acknowledgement of his government's failure in preventing it.

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