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,

#1351

William G. Howell

#53516

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (53 years)

William G. Howell is an American political scientist and author. He is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at Chicago Harris and a professor in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency.

#1352

Michael Zuckert

#38370

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael P. Zuckert is an American political philosopher and Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Zuckert earned a bachelor's degree in Cornell University in 1964, and completed his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1967 and 1974, respectively.

#1353

George Stephanopoulos

George Stephanopoulos

#20626

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (63 years)

George Robert Stephanopoulos is an American television host, political commentator, and former Democratic advisor. Stephanopoulos currently is a coanchor with Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, and host of This Week, ABC's Sunday morning current events news program.

#1354

Richard M. Locke

Richard M. Locke

#52092

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Richard Michael Locke is Dean of Apple University. Locke joined Apple after serving as the 13th provost of Brown University. He served as provost for 7.5 years, one of the longest serving provosts of Brown University.

#1355

Jonathan Koppell

Jonathan Koppell

#72312

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (54 years)

Jonathan Koppell is the President of Montclair State University, Montclair New Jersey. He previously served as dean of the Watts College of Public Service & Community Solutions and Provost for Public Service and Social Impact at Arizona State University.

#1356

Diana Villiers Negroponte

#54839

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Diana Mary Villiers Negroponte is an English-born American trade lawyer, Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, adjunct professor of international relations at the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and author of several books. Her professional name is Diana Villiers Negroponte. She is the wife of John Negroponte, the former United States Deputy Secretary of State and former U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

#1357

Claes de Vreese

#78233

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Claes Holger de Vreese is a Danish Professor of Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam . In addition, he is Affiliated Professor of Political Science and Journalism at the University of Southern Denmark . De Vreese is the founding Director of the Center for Politics and Communication. He is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the chair of its Social Science Council. Between 2005 and 2013, he was the Director of ASCoR and the Director of the Netherlands Sc...

#1358

Dorothy Thomas

#58765

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Dorothy Quincy Thomas is an American human rights activist. She was a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, and a 1995 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Life She graduated from Georgetown University with an M.A. in 1984. She is senior program advisor to the US Human Rights Fund. She was founding director of the Human Rights Watch, Women's Rights Division, from 1990 to 1998. She was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, from 2007 to 2008. She is a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She is a director of the Ms. Found...

#1359

Leslie Lipson

#68686

Overall Influence

1912 - 2000 (88 years)

Leslie M. Lipson was an American political scientist who was an expert in democracy and comparative government, and worked as a professor at universities in New Zealand and the United States. He was also a regular commentator on politics for media outlets such as PBS and the San Francisco Chronicle.

#1360

Irene S. Rubin

#53518

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Irene Sharp Rubin is an American political scientist, currently a Professor Emerita of Public Administration at Northern Illinois University. She researches the politics of public budgeting at various levels of American government, and she has written methodological texts on how to conduct and analyze research interviews.

#1361

Suh Sung

#31166

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Suh Sung is a Zainichi Korean academic and writer. He was previously a Professor of International Studies at Ritsumeikan University and a research advisor at the Ritsumeikan Center for Korean Studies. His specializations include contemporary Korean law and politics, human rights law in East Asia, and comparative human rights law.

#1362

Marianne Githens

Marianne Githens

#40641

Overall Influence

1936 - 2018 (82 years)

Marianne Githens was an American political scientist, feminist, and author. She was an Elizabeth Conolly Todd Distinguished Professor and the co-founder of the Women's Study Program at Goucher College. In 1977, she co-authored the anthology A Portrait of Marginality.

#1363

Farid Hafez

#30279

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (43 years)

Farid Hafez is an Austrian political scientist and holds the endowed chair of Class of 1955 Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College and senior researcher at Georgetown University's The Bridge Initiative. Before his role at Williams College, he was at the department of political science and sociology at the University of Salzburg.

#1364

Michael Taylor

#33764

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Michael Taylor is professor-emeritus at the University of Washington. Taylor completed his PhD at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He has taught at Essex and at Yale University and has held visiting positions at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the European University Institute in Florence, and at the Australian National University in Canberra.

#1365

Jack Knight

#20504

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Jack Knight is a political scientist and legal theorist. His academic contributions are about political, social, and law theory. He is currently a professor of law, politics, philosophy and economics at Duke University School of Law and at the Duke's Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of several books such as Institutions and Social Conflict , Explaining Social Institutions , and The Choices Justices Make with which he won the American Political Science Association C. Herman Prichett Award. He has also written many journal articles and edited volumes about democratic theory, rules of law, judicial decision-making, and theories of institutional emergence and change.

#1366

Naomi Murakawa

#56197

Overall Influence

#1367

Kenneth Shepsle

#43664

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Kenneth Shepsle is an American political scientist who is influential for rational choice scholarship. He is George D. Markham professor of government at Harvard University, and a research associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science there. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences.

#1368

Kumiko Haba

#25695

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

is a Japanese Professor of International Politics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. Her research is International Relations, International Politics, International Sociology, Power Shift and National Anxiety, Immigrants-Refugee questions, Nationalism and Xenophobia in the European Union. She wrote a book, Division and Integration in Europe, Nationalism and Border in the Enlarged EU—Inclusion or Exclusion, Chuokoronshinsya, 2016.

#1369

John G. West

#26539

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

John G. West is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute , and associate director and vice president for public policy and legal affairs of its Center for Science and Culture , which serves as the main hub of the pseudoscientific Intelligent design movement.

#1370

Richard McKelvey

#48287

Overall Influence

1944 - 2002 (58 years)

Richard Drummond McKelvey was a political scientist, specializing in mathematical theories of voting. He received his BS in Mathematics from Oberlin College, MA in mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, and PhD in political science from University of Rochester. He was an Econometric Society fellow, and was the Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology until his death, from cancer, in 2002.

#1371

Christoph Zürcher

#53434

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Christoph Zuercher is Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, where he has been since 2008. He used to be a professor of Political Science at the Free University in Berlin. He was also a Humboldt fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Role of Law at Stanford University.

#1372

Donald Moynihan

#59566

Overall Influence

Donald P. Moynihan is an Irish-American political scientist. He is the McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, having previously worked at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Texas A&M University. While at UW–Madison, his book The Dynamics of Performance Management: Constructing Information and Reform was named best book by the Academy of Management's Public and Nonprofit Division and received the Herbert Simon award from the American Political Science Association.

#1373

Nils Petter Gleditsch

#41716

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Nils Petter Gleditsch is a Norwegian sociologist and political scientist. He is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo . In 2009, Nils Petter Gleditsch was awarded the annual Award for Outstanding Research by the Research Council of Norway. He won the Norwegian Sociological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.

#1374

Steven S. Smith

#59255

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Steven S. Smith is Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University. He also is the Kate M. Gregg Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. For many years, he was the Director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, He served on the faculties of George Washington University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota and was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Smith is one of the leading scholars of legislative institutions and congressional politics.

#1375

Ryszard Terlecki

#29207

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ryszard Iwon Terlecki is a Polish politician, the Parliamentary Caucus Head of the Law and Justice party between 2015–2023. Terlecki, a historian and professor of humanities, lectures at the Pontifical University of John Paul II. He is a member of the Sejm, serving since 2007. He served as the Deputy Marshal of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland 2015–2023.

#1376

Norman Spector

#42059

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Norman Spector is a Canadian journalist and former diplomat, civil servant, and newspaper publisher. Early life and career Born in Montreal, Quebec, Spector received a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Political Science, from McGill University in 1970. Awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Political Science from Columbia University in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1977. In 1974, as a Newhouse Fellow, he received a Master of Science degree in Television, Film and Radio from Syracuse University. In 1974–1975, Spector was a lecturer at St. Paul's College of the ...

#1377

Jane Bennett

#22751

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Jane Bennett is an American political theorist and philosopher. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences. She was also the editor of the academic journal Political Theory between 2012 and 2017.

#1378

Cameron Munter

#21877

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Cameron Munter is a retired diplomat, academic, and executive who now works as a global consultant. He was President and CEO of the EastWest Institute in New York from 2015 to 2019, directing conflict resolution projects in Russia, China, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. He is currently a senior fellow of the CEVRO Institute in Prague and the Atlantic Council in Washington, and serves on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards.

#1379

Teivo Teivainen

Teivo Teivainen

#52293

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Teivo Teivainen is professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki. Having received his PhD in 2000 at the University of Helsinki, Teivainen became the founding director of the Program on Democracy and Global Transformation at the National University of San Marcos, in Lima, Peru in 2003.

#1380

Jorge I. Domínguez

#61082

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Jorge I. Domínguez , a scholar of Latin American studies in the United States, taught at Harvard University from 1972 to 2018, when he retired as the Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico.

#1381

Mia Bloom

#41115

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Mia M. Bloom is a Canadian academic, author, and Professor of Communication at Georgia State University. She was formerly an associate Professor of International Studies at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park and a fellow at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State.

#1382

Barnett Rubin

#52698

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Barnett Richard Rubin is an American political scientist and a leading expert on Afghanistan and South Asia. He is the author of eight books and is currently Senior Fellow and Director at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, a leading foreign policy center. He was previously Senior Advisor to the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has advised the United Nations, NATO, the United States and the Afghan government on numerous policy matters, including aid policy, security policy, and diplomatic strategy.

#1383

Tomasz Kitliński

Tomasz Kitliński

#26594

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Tomasz Kitliński is a Polish political philosopher, cultural and social analyst, and civic activist. He is a lecturer and trade unionist at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University and an author of books , articles, petitions and letters of protest. In his research and teaching, he deals with contemporary society, culture and politics, intellectual history, literary and critical theory, art practice, religious studies and social anthropology. In his activism, he champions women's, LGBT, labour and refugee rights and participation.

#1384

Linda Weiss

#65964

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Linda M. Weiss is an Australian professor of political science at the University of Sydney , specialising in the international and comparative politics of economic development. Weiss is best known for questioning the converging effect associated with globalisation by pointing to the mediating role played by domestic nation-state institutions and capabilities and arguing that the effect non-state powers have upon a government can be enabling as well as constraining. Furthermore, within this argument, rather than a movement towards a neoliberal model, Weiss sees the emergence of what she calls "governed interdependence".

#1385

Hartmut Elsenhans

#48610

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Hartmut Elsenhans is a German political scientist. He is an emeritus professor of International Relations at the University of Leipzig. Biography After graduating high school in his hometown, Stuttgart, he studied political science, history, sociology and Romance studies at the University of Tübingen and the Free University of Berlin. After earning his Diplom there in 1967, Elsenhans moved to Paris where he was a member of the Cycle Supérieur d’Etudes Politiques, where the likes of Ralf Dahrendorf, Theodor Eschenburg, Alfred Grosser, Gerhard Lehmbruch and Gilbert Ziebura were among his teachers.

#1386

Rita Klímová

#40415

Overall Influence

1931 - 1993 (62 years)

Rita Klímová, née Rita Budínová was a Czech economist and politician. She was Czechoslovakia's ambassador to the United States before that country's breakup in 1992. Early life Klímová was born in Romania. Her father was Stanislav Budín , a prominent Communist writer who used the pen name Batya Bat. Due to their Jewish ancestry, her family fled to the United States not long after Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. She settled in New York City in 1939, returning to Czechoslovakia in 1946 to finish her education. As a result, for the rest of her life she spoke American English with an...

#1387

James Jupp

#39948

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (92 years)

James Jupp AM was a British-Australian political scientist and author. He was Director of the Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and an Adjunct Professor of the RMIT University in Melbourne. He was an Australian citizen and resident of Canberra.

#1388

Jytte Klausen

#42963

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jytte Klausen is a Danish-born scholar of politics who teaches at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts as the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation in the Department of Politics. Klausen has also served as an affiliate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, among other positions.

#1389

Séverine Autesserre

Séverine Autesserre

#43706

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (48 years)

Séverine Autesserre is a French-American author and researcher. She writes about war and peace, peacebuilding, peacekeeping, humanitarian aid, the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and African politics. Autesserre is a professor and Chair of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University , where she specializes in international relations and African studies. She previously worked for international humanitarian and development agencies.

#1390

Roger Cressey

#29387

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (59 years)

Roger W. Cressey is a cyber security and counter-terrorism expert and served in senior positions under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He is a former member of the United States National Security Council staff and the Founder and former President of the Good Harbor consulting group.

#1391

Robert Melson

#33159

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Robert Melson is professor emeritus of political science and a member of the Jewish studies program at Purdue University. From 2003 to 2005, he was the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars . In 2006 and 2007, he was the Cathy Cohen-Lasry Distinguished Professor in the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts.

#1392

Hafsat Abiola

#63323

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Hafsat Olaronke Abiola-Costello, in Lagos, is a Nigerian human rights, civil rights and democracy activist, founder of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy , which seeks to strengthen civil society and promote democracy in Nigeria. She is President of Women in Africa Initiative , international platform for the economic development and support of African women entrepreneurs. She is also one of the founders of Connected Women Leaders .

#1393

Rose McDermott

#30496

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Rose McDermott is an American political scientist who is the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University. She has also taught at Cornell, UCSB, and Harvard. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Her work is situated at the intersection of several disciplines including political science, psychology, biology, methods, development, and gender studies.

#1394

Jan Sundberg

#53084

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Jan Sundberg is a professor of the department of the political science in the University of Helsinki. He has published many studies concerning the party system of Finland both in English and Swedish languages. He has also given interviews to Hufvudstadsbladet.

#1395

Saul Newman

#7400

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Saul Newman is a British political theorist who writes on post-anarchism. He is professor of political theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Newman took up the term "post-anarchism" as a general term for political philosophies filtering 19th century anarchism through a post-structuralist lens, and later popularized it through his 2001 book From Bakunin to Lacan. Thus he rejects a number of concepts traditionally associated with anarchism, including essentialism, a "positive" human nature, and the concept of revolution. The links between poststructuralism and anarchism have also ...

#1396

Nadav Safran

#53707

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Nadav Safran was an expert in Arab and Middle East politics and a director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Life Safran was born in Cairo in 1925 to Joseph and Jeanne Safran, parents of oriental Jewish heritage. He married Anita Balicka on June 9, 1955 and had three daughters — Abigail, Nina, and Elizabeth.

#1397

Robert G. Ackman

#80981

Overall Influence

#1398

Arthur Lupia

#51824

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (60 years)

Arthur Lupia is an American political scientist. He is the Gerald R. Ford University Professor at the University of Michigan and Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. Prior to joining NSF, he was Chairperson of the Board of the Center for Open Science and Chair of National Research Council's Roundtable on the Application of Behavioral and Social Science. His research concerns how information and institutions affect policy and politics, with a focus on how people make decisions when they lack information. He draws from multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines and uses multiple research methods.

#1399

Mark Leonard

#28977

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Mark Hugo Leonard is a British political scientist and author. He is the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations , which he founded in 2007. He has been writing for Project Syndicate, an international media organization, since 2004.

#1400

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein

#25511

Overall Influence

1940 - 2010 (70 years)

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein was an American social theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, and a professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles. Early life and education Wolfenstein graduated with his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Columbia College in 1962. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

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