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).
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#1201
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
#27360
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
#1202
Jeffrey Friedman
#43760
Overall Influence
1959 - 2022 (63 years)
Jeffrey Friedman was an American political scientist and was the founder and editor of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society. Friedman majored in history and philosophy at Brown University. He received an MA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985 and a PhD in political science from Yale in 2002. He taught in the Government department at Dartmouth College in 1998, the Social Studies program at Harvard from 1998 to 2000, and the Political Science department at Barnard College, Columbia University from 2001 to 2006.
Go to Profile#1203
Amitav Acharya
#44821
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Amitav Acharya is an Indian-born Canadian scholar and author, who is Distinguished Professor of International Relations at American University, Washington, D.C., where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, and serves as the chair of the ASEAN Studies Initiative. Acharya has expertise in and has made contributions to a wide range of topics in International Relations, including constructivism, ASEAN and Asian regionalism, and Global International Relations. He became the first non-Western President of the International Studi...
Go to Profile#1204
David P. Gardner
#18923
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Pierpont Gardner was the 15th president of the University of California and was also the president of the University of Utah. Biography Gardner was born in Berkeley, California, to Reed S. Gardner and Margaret Pierpont Gardner. He married Elizabeth Fuhriman in 1958. They had four daughters before Libby's death in 1991. He married Sheila S. Rogers in 1995.
Go to Profile#1205
William Galston
#24430
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
William Arthur Galston is an American author, academic, and political advisor, who holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Formerly the Saul Stern Professor and Dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a professor of political science at the University of Texas, Austin, Galston specializes in issues of U.S. public philosophy and political institutions, having joined the Brookings Institution on January 1, 2006.
Go to Profile#1206
Tom Ginsburg
#32797
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is primarily known as a scholar of international and comparative law, with a focus on constitutions and a regional specialty of East Asia.
Go to Profile#1207
Paul H. Lewis
#53960
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Paul H. Lewis is professor emeritus and former Chair of Political Science at Tulane University. Lewis received his BA from the University of Florida and PhD from UNC Chapel Hill. In 1991, he helped organize the Louisiana chapter of the National Association of Scholars.
Go to Profile#1208
Warner R. Schilling
#27724
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Warner Roller Schilling was an American political scientist and international relations scholar at Columbia University , where he was the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations. He was director of the university's Institute of War and Peace Studies from 1976 to 1986.
Go to Profile#1209
Jane Fountain
#62868
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jane E. Fountain is an American political scientist and technology theorist. She is Distinguished University Professor of political science and public policy, the founder and director of the National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and formerly faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is known for her work on institutional change and on the use of technology in governance.
Go to Profile#1210
T. J. Pempel
#61820
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
T. J. Pempel is Jack M. Forcey Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in July 2001 and was also the director of the Institute of East Asian Studies from January 2002 until 2007. He held the Il Han New Chair in Asian Studies from 2001-2007. He retired in 2022.
Go to Profile#1211
Marco Tarchi
#62627
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Marco Tarchi is an Italian political scientist. He is currently full professor of Political Science, Political Theory and Political Communication at the Cesare Alfieri School of Political Sciences of the University of Florence. His research is focused primarily on populism, democracy, political organization, and extreme right.
Go to Profile#1212
Adam Drewnowski
#73554
Overall Influence
#1213
Astrid S. Tuminez
#37960
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Mary Astrid Segovia Tuminez is the seventh president of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, and its first female president. Early life and education Astrid Tuminez was born in a small island village in Iloilo province, the Philippines. Though raised in extreme poverty as the sixth of seven children, she received a scholarship at the age of five to attend a private school run by Catholic nuns, along with her older siblings. She credits much of her success and accomplishments to this pivotal moment in her life, and is passionate in her belief that education enables individuals to fulfill the...
Go to Profile#1214
Merze Tate
#31844
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Vernie Merze Tate was a professor, scholar and expert on United States diplomacy. She was the first African-American graduate of Western Michigan Teachers College, first African-American woman to attend the University of Oxford, first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in government and international relations from Harvard University , as well as one of the first two female members to join the Department of History at Howard University.
Go to Profile#1215
Kenneth M. Pollack
#36000
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Kenneth Michael Pollack is an American former CIA intelligence analyst and expert on Middle East politics and military affairs. He has served on the National Security Council staff and has written several articles and books on international relations. Currently, he is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before that he was Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and a senior advisor at Albri...
Go to Profile#1216
Patrick Chabal
#27151
Overall Influence
1951 - 2014 (63 years)
Patrick Chabal was an Africanist of the late 20th and early 21st century. He had a long academic career. Patrick Chabal's latest position was Chair in African History & Politics at King's College London. He published numerous books, book chapters and articles about Africa. He was one of the founders of AEGIS and was a board member for many years.
Go to Profile#1217
John Paul Lederach
#30911
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
John Paul Lederach is an American Professor of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, and concurrently Distinguished Scholar at Eastern Mennonite University. He has written widely on conflict resolution and mediation. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado. In 1994 he became the founding director for the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University where he was a professor. He currently works for the foundation Humanity United.
Go to Profile#1218
Michael Auslin
#30216
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Michael Robert Auslin is an American writer, policy analyst, historian, and scholar of Asia. He is currently the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a Senior Fellow in the Asia and National Security Programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a senior fellow at London's Policy Exchange. He was formerly an associate professor at Yale University and a resident scholar and director of Japanese studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#1219
Riadh Sidaoui
#39492
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Riadh Sidaoui is a Swiss-Tunisian thinker, writer, journalist and political scientist. He is the director of the Geneva-based Arab Centre for Political and Social Research and Analysis, and the editor-in-chief of the news website Taqadoumiya since 2010. He published articles in London-based newspapers such as Al-Hayat and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. He regularly appears on international television news channels such as France 24, RT, BBC and Voice of America, as well as on radio stations such as Radio Television Suisse, Deutsche Welle and Monte Carlo Doualiya.
Go to Profile#1220
Benno Teschke
#28332
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Benno Teschke is a German international relations theorist. He is professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Teschke's scholarship is a contribution to Marxist international relations theory, specifically in the Political Marxism tendency. He obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1999, with a thesis titled The making of the Westphalian state-system: Social property relations, geopolitics and the myth of 1648.
Go to Profile#1221
Robert Weissberg
#41980
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Weissberg was an American political scientist and writer. He was a professor of political science at the University of Illinois and was the author of twelve books on politics and pedagogy. He published numerous scientific papers in leading journals in political science. Weissberg has also written for magazines such as Forbes, Society, and The Weekly Standard. He was also a speaker at American Renaissance Magazine conferences where he was outspoken about his belief in the average mental differences between racial populations.
Go to Profile#1222
Alex J. Bellamy
#49543
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Alexander J. Bellamy is an academic who directs the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and is a professor in the department of peace and conflict studies at University of Queensland.
Go to Profile#1223
Kim Beazley
#34660
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kim Christian Beazley is an Australian former politician and diplomat. Since 2022 he has served as the Chairman of the Australian War Memorial. Previously, he was leader of the Australian Labor Party and leader of the opposition from 1996 to 2001 and 2005 to 2006, having previously been a cabinet minister in the Hawke and Keating governments. After leaving parliament, he served as ambassador to the United States from 2010 to 2016 and governor of Western Australia from 2018 to 2022.
Go to Profile#1224
David M. Barrett
#49275
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David M. Barrett is a professor of political science at Villanova University and author of "Blind Over Cuba: The Photo Gap and the Missile Crisis" , "The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy" , Lyndon B. Johnson's Vietnam Papers , and Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers . The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy won the D. B. Hardeman Prize in 2005. A former radio and television journalist, Barrett unsuccessfully sought election in Indiana to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1984.
Go to Profile#1225
James Goodby
#23984
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
James Eugene Goodby is an author and former American diplomat. Goodby was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in 1951 and served as a second lieutenant in the Air Force during the Korean War from 1952–53. He attended the University of Michigan and Harvard University .
Go to Profile#1226
Mikhail Mishustin
#31368
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin is a Russian politician and economist serving as the prime minister of Russia since 16 January 2020. He previously served as the director of the Federal Taxation Service from 2010 to 2020.
Go to Profile#1227
Michael Herb
#52139
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Michael Herb is an American political scientist who gained prominence through his All in the Family thesis of Arab monarchies. Biographical details Herb graduated from University of Washington in 1987, earned his master's degree from UCLA in 1992, and completed his doctorate at UCLA in 1997. He joined the faculty of the Georgia State Political Science Department in 1998.
Go to Profile#1228
Alberto Martinez Piedra
#43425
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Alberto Martinez Piedra was the David E. Bentley Professor of Political Economy at The Institute of World Politics. Dr. Piedra was the Director of the Latin American Institute at The Catholic University of America from 1965 to 1982. He was the United States Ambassador to Guatemala .
Go to Profile#1229
Ben Smith
#12122
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Benjamin Eli Smith is an American journalist who is the co-founder of Semafor, a global news organization he formed with Justin Smith in early 2022. He was previously a media columnist at The New York Times from 2020 to 2022. From 2011 to 2020, he was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
Go to Profile#1230
Christopher A. Kojm
#52465
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Christopher A. "Chris" Kojm is a professor at George Washington University. He served as the chairman of the United States National Intelligence Council from 2009 to 2014. Biography Kojm was valedictorian at Lancaster High School. Kojm went on to receive an AB from Harvard College in 1977 and an MA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1979. From 1979 to 1984 he was a senior editor at the Foreign Policy Association in New York City.
Go to Profile#1231
Michael J. Malbin
#49886
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael J. Malbin is a professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, The State University of New York. He was also the founding director of the Campaign Finance Institute in Washington DC from 1999 until he retired from that position in 2020. His co-authored books while at CFI included The Election After Reform: Money, Politics and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act , Life After Reform: When the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act Meets Politics , and Vital Statistics on Congress, co-authored with Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann.
Go to Profile#1232
Brian Klaas
#48587
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Brian Paul Klaas is an American political scientist and contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is an associate professor in global politics at University College London. He is the author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. He is also the co-author of How to Rig an Election.
Go to Profile#1233
Trond Nordby
#38318
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Trond Nordby is a Norwegian historian and political scientist. He graduated candidatus philologiæ in 1972, and received his PhD in 1984. He worked as a research fellow and lecturer of history at the University of Oslo from 1975 to 1986. From 1985 to 1989 he was a researcher for NAVF, and from 1990 he worked at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research. He is now a professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, having been promoted in 1995.
Go to Profile#1234
Barry Black
#11180
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Barry Clayton Black is the 62nd chaplain of the United States Senate. He began serving as Senate chaplain on June 27, 2003, becoming the first African American and first Seventh-day Adventist to hold the office.
Go to Profile#1235
Henry J. Abraham
#19537
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Henry Julian Abraham was a German-born American scholar on the judiciary and constitutional law. He was James Hart Professor of Government Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He was the author of 13 books, most in multiple editions, and more than 100 articles on the U.S. Supreme Court, judicial appointments, judicial process, and civil rights and liberties.
Go to Profile#1236
Norman P. Barry
#13428
Overall Influence
1944 - 2008 (64 years)
Norman Patrick Barry was an English political philosopher best known as an exponent of classical liberalism. For much of his career he was a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham.
Go to Profile#1237
William T. Gormley
#58422
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
William T. Gormley is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Gormley, a scholar of child care and education, is also the co-director of the Center for Research on Children. Gormley is an advocate of Pre-kindergarten, and has extensively studied programs in Oklahoma, calling it a "beacon for early childhood advocates."
Go to Profile#1238
Lynton K. Caldwell
#45636
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Lynton Keith Caldwell was an American political scientist and a principal architect of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, the first act of its kind in the world. He was educated at the University of Chicago and spent most of his career at Indiana University Bloomington, where he received tenure in 1956 and retired as Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of Political Science in 1984. Caldwell was the internationally acclaimed author or coauthor of fifteen books and more than 250 scholarly articles, which may be found in at least 19 different languages. He served on many boards and adv...
Go to Profile#1239
Sarah Birch
#32180
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Sarah Birch, is an American political scientist and academic, specialising in comparative politics. Since 2016, she has been Professor of Political Science at King's College London. She had taught at the University of Essex between 1996 and 2013, and held the Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Glasgow between 2013 and 2016.
Go to Profile#1240
Suzanne Berger
#53245
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Suzanne Doris Berger is an American political scientist. She is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative. A leading authority in comparative politics and political economy, she has pointed to the centrality of politics in mediating and redirecting ostensibly transcendent forces, such as economic modernization and globalization.
Go to Profile#1241
Patri Friedman
#15522
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Patri Friedman is an American libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, and theorist of political economy. He founded The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit that explores the creation of sovereign ocean colonies.
Go to Profile#1242
Keren Yarhi-Milo
#33589
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Keren Yarhi-Milo is an American political scientist specializing in the study of interstate communication, crisis bargaining, reputation and credibility, and the psychology of leaders and decision makers. She is the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Relations at Columbia University. She is also a former director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia.
Go to Profile#1243
Afshin Ellian
#13050
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Afshin Ellian is an Iranian-born Dutch professor of law, philosopher, poet, and critic of political Islam. He is an expert in international public law and philosophy of law. Biography In 1989, Ellian came to the Netherlands as a political refugee. Having experienced first-hand the Islamic theocratic government of Iran, he writes often about how such issues are affecting the world in general and the Netherlands in particular. Due to threats on his life tied to such criticism, he is currently heavily guarded.
Go to Profile#1244
Ulrike Guérot
#28505
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Ulrike Beate Guérot is a Berlin-based German political thinker and Founder and Director of the European Democracy Lab . In April 2016, the University for Continuing Education Krems appointed Ulrike Guérot as Professor for European Policy and the Study of Democracy. She was the head of the Department for European Policy and the Study of Democracy. From 2021 until March 2023, she held the professorship for European Politics at the University of Bonn.
Go to Profile#1245
John Smith
#32943
Overall Influence
1938 - 1994 (56 years)
John Smith was a British Labour Party politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from July 1992 until his death from a heart attack in May 1994. He was also the Member of Parliament for Monklands East.
Go to Profile#1246
Clinton Jencks
#39744
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Clinton Jencks was an American lifelong activist in labor and social justice causes, most famous for union organizing among New Mexico's miners, acting in the 1954 film Salt of the Earth , and enduring years of government prosecution for allegedly falsifying a Taft-Hartley non-communist affidavit.
Go to Profile#1247
Jonathan Moore
#42503
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Jonathan Moore was United States Director of the Bureau of Refugee Programs from 1987 to 1989 and United States Representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council from 1989 to 1992. Biography Jonathan Moore was born in New York City on September 10, 1932. He was educated at Dartmouth College, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1954 and at Harvard University, receiving an MPA in 1957.
Go to Profile#1248
John Ishiyama
#53373
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
John Toaru Ishiyama is an American political scientist. He is a University Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science, and Chairperson of the Department of Political Science. He is also the Piper Professor of Texas at the University of North Texas. He studies comparative politics, particularly the party structure and democratization of Post-Soviet states, as well as the politics of Ethiopia. He is immediate past President of the American Political Science Association.
Go to Profile#1249
Maleeha Lodhi
#25530
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Maleeha Lodhi is a Pakistani diplomat, political scientist, and a former Pakistan's Representative to the United Nations. She was the first woman to hold the position. Previously, she served as Pakistan's envoy to the Court of St James' and twice as its ambassador to the United States.
Go to Profile#1250
Everett Carll Ladd
#33446
Overall Influence
1937 - 1999 (62 years)
Everett Carll Ladd Jr. was an American political scientist based at the University of Connecticut. He was best known for his analysis and collection of public opinion polls. He directed the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut; the Center's mission is to collect and preserve the reports and the original raw computerized data of polls and surveys since the 1930s. At his death, he had amassed 14,000 surveys from many countries. He was also an expert on the opinions and careers of social scientists.
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