The Most Influential People Across History
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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#1001
John Lindsay
#10225
Overall Influence
1921 - 2000 (79 years)
John Vliet Lindsay was an American politician and lawyer. During his political career, Lindsay was a U.S. congressman, mayor of New York City, and candidate for U.S. president. He was also a regular guest host of Good Morning America. Lindsay served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from January 1959 to December 1965 and as mayor of New York City from January 1966 to December 1973.
Go to Profile#1002
Marlène Laruelle
#21436
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Marlène Laruelle is a French historian, sociologist, and political scientist specializing on Eurasia and Europe. She is Research Professor and Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University . Laruelle is also a Co-Director of PONARS , Director of GW’s Central Asia Program, and Director of GW's Illiberalism Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in history at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures and spent time as a post-doc in the area of political science at Sciences Po in Paris. She is Senior Associate Scholar at the Institut français des relations internationales .
Go to Profile#1003
John Tirman
#28869
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
John Tirman was an American political theorist. From 2004, Tirman was executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies. There he led the Persian Gulf Initiative, which conducted work on Iraq war mortality and U.S. and Iran relations, as well as other projects. He was the author or coauthor of 13 books on international affairs, many of them exploring and advocating the “human security” paradigm in global affairs, and was a frequent contributor to AlterNet, The Huffington Post, and The Boston Globe.
Go to Profile#1004
Richard Bensel
#48797
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Richard Franklin Bensel is a professor of American politics at Cornell University. Bensel has attempted to bridge the gap between American economic and political history, with an eye toward comparative implications. Bensel is best known as a scholar of political economy. His most recent work, Passions and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention , attempts to bring American political development into a conversation with rational choice theory.
Go to Profile#1005
Jennifer Welsh
#30814
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jennifer Mary Welsh is a Canadian professor of international relations, currently working as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. Welsh is the Director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies at McGill's Max Bell School of Public Policy, and a co-director of the Canadian Research Network on Women, Peace and Security. Welsh is a frequent commentator in Canadian media on foreign affairs.
Go to Profile#1006
Sverre Lodgaard
#36904
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Sverre Lodgaard is a Norwegian political scientist who has held several senior positions within government and non-governmental organizations, including the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs . Lodgaard specializes in peace, foreign and security policy, but has also worked on developing country issues. He has since the 2000s written extensively on nuclear arms control and disarmament issues and on Middle East affairs.
Go to Profile#1007
Nicolas van de Walle
#31800
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Nicolas van de Walle is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He has taught at Cornell University since 2004, and is currently the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government. Between January 2004 and June 2008 he directed the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Before coming to Cornell, he taught at Michigan State University, and has worked at The World Bank and The United Nations Development Program. Since 2005, Van de Walle has served as the Associate Dean for International Studies. Van de Walle has written the "Africa" book review section for Forei...
Go to Profile#1008
Mauno Koivisto
#25901
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Mauno Henrik Koivisto was a Finnish politician who served as the ninth president of Finland from 1982 to 1994. He also served as the country's prime minister twice, from 1968 to 1970 and again from 1979 to 1982. He was also the first member of the Social Democratic Party to be elected as President of Finland.
Go to Profile#1009
Thomas J. Biersteker
#30340
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Thomas J. Biersteker is an American political scientist and a notable constructivism scholar. He became the first Curt Gasteyger Professor of International Security at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007, where he is also a member of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding. He is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Social Science Research Council and is on the Editorial Board of Stability: International Journal of Security and Development. His more recent work included advising the United Nations...
Go to Profile#1010
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#9105
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
Go to Profile#1011
Jennifer Hochschild
#46375
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#1012
Arun Agrawal
#33505
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Arun Agrawal is a political scientist and the Samuel Trask Dana Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Agrawal is the coordinator for the International Forestry Resources and Institutions network and does research in Africa and South Asia.
Go to Profile#1013
Joseph Cirincione
#29307
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joseph Cirincione Career Cirincione was appointed president of Ploughshares Fund on March 5, 2008. He retired from the position on July 1, 2020. He joined the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft as a non-resident fellow in September 2020, and is an adjunct faculty member at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He resigned from the Quincy Institute in August 2022 in protest of its dovish response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which he described as "a completely unjustified, unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state".
Go to Profile#1014
Lisa Martin
#54113
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lisa Martin is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She studies political institutions in international relations, including economic sanctions and cooperation between states. Martin was the first female editor of International Organization, where she also currently serves as a senior advisor to the journal's editorial board. In 2021, she was elected as president of the American Political Science Association for 2022-2023.
Go to Profile#1015
Jean L. Cohen
#19988
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jean Louise Cohen is the Nell and Herbert Singer Professor of Political Thought at Columbia University. She specializes in contemporary political and legal theory with particular research interests in democratic theory, critical theory, civil society, gender and the law.
Go to Profile#1016
Scott Malcomson
#29131
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Scott L. Malcomson is an author, former reporter, former U.S. government official, research fellow, and consultant in the United States. He was a foreign editor for the New York Times Magazine from 2004 until 2011 and has written for publications including Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The World Post. He has worked for Non-Governmental Organizations and was a senior official at the United Nations and U.S. State Department. Malcomson was a fellow in New America's International Security program. He reported and writes about issues such as globalism bas...
Go to Profile#1017
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu
#31185
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is a Turkish politician and former leader of the Republican People's Party . He was Leader of the Main Opposition in Turkey between 2010 and 2023. He served as a member of parliament for Istanbul's second electoral district from 2002 to 2015, and as an MP for İzmir's second electoral district from 2015 to 2023.
Go to Profile#1018
Torben Iversen
#28449
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Torben Iversen is a Danish political economist, currently Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. In 2016, he was named BP Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#1019
John Aldrich
#48184
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
John Herbert Aldrich is an American political scientist and author, known for his research and writings on American politics, elections, and political parties, and on formal theory and methodology in political science.
Go to Profile#1020
Brenda Shaffer
#35859
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Brenda Shaffer is an American scholar who holds positions as Fellow with the Atlantic Council and professor at University of Haifa . Shaffer was the former research director of the Caspian Studies Program at Harvard Kennedy School and past president of the Foreign Policy Section of the American Political Science Association. She specializes on energy in international relations and energy policy in the Caspian region and has written or edited several books of these topics, including "Energy Politics" and "Beyond the Resource Curse." Shaffer has also written a number of books on the topic of identity and culture in the Caucasus including explorations of Azeri literature and culture.
Go to Profile#1021
Hanspeter Kriesi
#33760
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hanspeter Kriesi is a professor of political science at the European University Institute in Florence where he holds the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics. Previously, he has been teaching at the universities of Amsterdam, Geneva and Zurich. He was born in Bischofszell, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#1022
Benjamin Radcliff
#21828
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Benjamin Radcliff is an American political scientist and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is also affiliated with the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy and the Higgins Labor Studies Program. Best known for his work on the connections between politics and human happiness, his research also encompasses democratic theory, political economy, and the study of organized labor.
Go to Profile#1023
Nolan McCarty
#26036
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Nolan Matthew McCarty is an American political scientist specializing in U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political methodology. He has made notable contributions to the study of partisan polarization, the politics of economic inequality, theories of policy-making, and the statistical analysis of legislative voting.
Go to Profile#1024
Thomas A. Birkland
#51422
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Thomas A. Birkland is a political scientist specializing in the study of public policy. Books include An Introduction to Public Policy , After Disaster , and Lessons of Disaster . He began his career at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. From 2007 to 2017 he was the William Kretzer Distinguished Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public and International Affairs at North Carolina State University. His work continues to focus on public policy theory, primarily in the fields of disasters, accidents, and homeland security.
Go to Profile#1025
Marlene Wind
#50943
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Marlene Wind is a Danish political scientist. She is a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen, where she has been also Director of the Center for European Policy. She specializes in the law, policies, and politics of the European Union.
Go to Profile#1026
Ivan Katchanovski
#20450
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Ivan Katchanovski is a Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist. He teaches at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Katchanovski's research focuses on democratization, comparative politics, political communication, and conflicts: in particular, in Ukraine, and especially the origins of the Donbas War, which he has characterized as a civil war, and the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Go to Profile#1027
Stephen Sestanovich
#44439
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stephen Rockwell Sestanovich is an American government official, academic, and author. He is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University where he is the Director of the International Fellows Program. His areas of expertise include Russia and the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and U.S. foreign policy.
Go to Profile#1028
Preston Manning
#31430
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ernest Preston Manning is a Canadian retired politician. He was the founder and the only leader of the Reform Party of Canada, a Canadian federal political party that evolved into the Canadian Alliance in 2000 which in turn merged with the Progressive Conservative Party to form today's Conservative Party of Canada in 2003. Manning represented the federal constituency of Calgary Southwest in the Canadian House of Commons from 1993 until his retirement in 2002. He served as leader of the Official Opposition from 1997 to 2000.
Go to Profile#1029
Bruno Perreau
#11798
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Bruno Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Faculty Associate at the Center for European Studies, Harvard. Perreau taught political science, law, and gender studies at Sciences Po, where he opened with Françoise Gaspard the first undergraduate course on LGBT politics. Perreau has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study , a Newton fellow in sociology and a Jesus College research associate at the University of Cambridge, and, more recently, a fellow at Stanford Humanities Center. He was also Burkhardt Fellow...
Go to Profile#1030
Keith Dowding
#23884
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Keith Martin Dowding is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Political Philosophy, School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. He was in the Government Department at the London School of Economics, UK in 2006. He has published widely in the fields of public choice, public administration, public policy, British politics, comparative politics, urban political economy, positive political theory and normative political philosophy. His work is informed by social and rational choice theories.
Go to Profile#1031
David A. Lake
#48963
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
David A. Lake is an American political scientist. He is the Gerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is known for his contributions to International Relations and International Political Economy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. He has been President of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association.
Go to Profile#1032
Kalevi Holsti
#36152
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Kalevi Jaakko Holsti, is a Canadian political scientist. Kal Holsti and his elder brother Ole were born in Geneva, while their father Rudolf served as Finland's ambassador to the League of Nations. Following the outbreak of World War II, the Holsti family was unable to return to Finland, and instead settled in the United States, where Rudolf held a visiting professorship at Stanford University. Kal and Ole lived with the families of Rudolf's Stanford colleagues after he died, as Liisa, their mother, had been hospitalized since 1943 with tuberculosis.
Go to Profile#1033
Laura Silber
#29611
Overall Influence
Laura Silber is the Vice President for Advocacy and Communications at the Open Society Foundations, where she runs the Communications department and oversees advocacy strategy and public identity. Since 2007 she has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
Go to Profile#1034
Anne Hessing Cahn
#40932
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Anne Hessing Cahn is a political author who holds a doctorate in political science from MIT. She was notable for her criticism of the CIA among other US agencies and leaders, particularly Team B and other aspects of the last days of the Cold War.
Go to Profile#1035
Dessima Williams
#23307
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Dessima D Williams is a Grenadian diplomat and former Ambassador to the United Nations from Grenada who was reappointed to the ambassadorship in 2008. Since 2022 she has been President of the Senate.
Go to Profile#1036
Jonathan Haslam
#35471
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Jonathan Haslam is George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge with a special interest in the former Soviet Union. He has written many books about Soviet foreign policy and ideology.
Go to Profile#1037
Tetsunari Iida
#26466
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Tetsunari Iida is director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Japan. Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, he is calling for a decrease in Japan's reliance on nuclear power and an increase in renewable energy use.
Go to Profile#1038
Simon Leys
#9046
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Pierre Ryckmans , better known by his pen name Simon Leys, was a Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, art historian, sinologist, and university professor, who lived in Australia from 1970. His work particularly focused on the politics and traditional culture of China, calligraphy, French and English literature, the commercialization of universities, and nautical fiction. Through the publication of his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao , Ombres chinoises and Images brisées , he was one of the first intellectuals to denounce the Cultural Revolution in Chi...
Go to Profile#1039
Arash Abizadeh
#28262
Overall Influence
Arash Abizadeh is an Iranian-Canadian philosopher and Professor at the Department of Political Science and Associate Member of the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. He is known for his expertise on democratic theory and Thomas Hobbes. He is a recipient of Rhodes Scholarship .
Go to Profile#1040
Sunil Khilnani
#28000
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Sunil Khilnani is a professor of politics and history at Ashoka University, India. Previously, he was a professor of politics and the Director of the King's College London India Institute. He is a scholar of Indian history and politics best known as the author of The Idea of India . He was the presenter of a BBC Radio 4 series entitled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, which was later published as a book in 2016. He was a 2010 Berlin Prize Fellow, and he was also a recipient of the Indian government's 2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award.
Go to Profile#1041
George A. Lopez
#42720
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
George A. Lopez is a founding faculty of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame where he holds the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. Chair in Peace Studies. Lopez researches state violence and coercion, especially economic sanctions, human rights, ethics and the use of force.
Go to Profile#1042
David Collier
#46483
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Collier is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He works in the fields of comparative politics, Latin American politics, and methodology. His father was the anthropologist Donald Collier.
Go to Profile#1043
James Kurth
#37836
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
James Kurth is the Claude C. Smith Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Swarthmore College, where he taught defense policy, foreign policy, and international politics. In 2004 Kurth also became the editor of Orbis, a professional journal on international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#1044
Dan Baer
#40055
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Daniel Brooks Baer is an American politician and former diplomat from Colorado currently serving as Senior Vice President for Policy Research at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Baer served in the Obama administration's State Department, first as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor from 2009 to 2013, and then as United States Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe from 2013 to 2017. In 2018, Governor John Hickenlooper appointed Baer as the executive director of the Colorado Department of High...
Go to Profile#1045
Wilfred Reilly
#29279
Overall Influence
Wilfred Reilly is an American political scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Southern Illinois University and a J.D. degree from the University of Illinois College of Law. Reilly's research focuses on empirical testing of political claims.
Go to Profile#1046
Pepper D. Culpepper
#52865
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Pepper Dagenhart Culpepper is an American political scientist. Culpepper obtained a bachelor of arts in political science at Duke University in 1990. He received a Marshall Scholarship, with which he pursued a Master of Letters in political science at Oxford University, graduating in 1992. Culpepper returned to the United States, enrolling at Harvard University, where he completed a master of arts and doctorate both in political science. He began teaching at Harvard in 1998 as an assistant professor of public policy, one year before obtaining his Ph.D. Culpepper became an associate professor in 2003.
Go to Profile#1047
Marc Hetherington
#64950
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Marc Joseph Hetherington is an American political scientist. He is a professor of political science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Biography Hetherington has taught at the University of Virginia, Princeton University, Bowdoin College, and Vanderbilt University. He received a bachelor degree from University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#1048
Robyn Eckersley
#29987
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Robyn Eckersley is a Professor and Head of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. Background Eckersley grew up in Perth and graduated in law from the University of Western Australia. She studied at the University of Cambridge, and has a PhD in environmental politics from the University of Tasmania. She was previously a public lawyer, then a lecturer at Monash University until 2001 when she moved to the University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#1049
Laura Sjoberg
#38592
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Laura Elizabeth Sjoberg is an American feminist scholar of international relations and international security. Her work specializes in gendered interpretations of just war theory, feminist security studies, and women's violence in global politics.
Go to Profile#1050
M. Crawford Young
#53684
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Merwin Crawford Young was an American political scientist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Education He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his PhD from Harvard in 1964, where his advisor was the famed scholar Rupert Emerson, the only person ever to serve as president of both the African Studies Association and the Asian Studies Association.
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