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.

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List of the most influential people in Political Science,

#151

Kathryn Bolkovac

#8577

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Kathryn Bolkovac is a human rights advocate, consultant, former police investigator with the Lincoln Police Department, and former monitor with United Nations International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She came to prominence when she sued her employers for unfair dismissal after she lost her job following her attempts to expose sex trafficking in Bosnia. Her story was shown in the film The Whistleblower and told in the nonfiction book, The Whistleblower.

#152

Irina Bokova

#2024

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Irina Georgieva Bokova is a Bulgarian politician and the former Director-General of UNESCO . During her political and diplomatic career in Bulgaria, she served, among others, two terms as a member of the National parliament, and deputy minister of foreign affairs and minister of foreign affairs ad interim under Prime Minister Zhan Videnov. She also served as Bulgaria's ambassador to France and to Monaco, and was Bulgaria's Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. Bokova was also the personal representative of Bulgaria's president to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie .

#153

Theodore J. Lowi

Theodore J. Lowi

#9102

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

Theodore J. "Ted" Lowi was an American political scientist. He was the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions teaching in the Government Department at Cornell University. His area of research was the American government and public policy. He was a member of the core faculty of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs.

#154

Robert Axelrod

#1013

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Robert Marshall Axelrod is an American political scientist. He is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has been since 1974. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work on the evolution of cooperation. His current research interests include complexity theory , international security, and cyber security. His research includes innovative approaches to explaining conflict of interest, the emergence of norms, how game theory is used to study cooperation, and cross-disciplinary studies on evolutionary processes.

#155

Michael Oren

#2886

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Michael Bornstein Oren is an American-Israeli diplomat, essayist, historian, novelist, and politician. He is a former Israeli ambassador to the United States , former member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and a former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Office.

#156

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

#5431

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Biography Bueno de Mesquita graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1963, , earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967 and then his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is one of the originators of selectorate theory, and was also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy from 2006 to 2016.

#157

Michael Ledeen

#2938

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael Arthur Ledeen is an American historian and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. He is a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was very close to Antonio Martino.

#158

Julian Bond

#1672

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Horace Julian Bond was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.

#159

Sidney Tarrow

#4259

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Sidney George Tarrow is an emeritus professor of political science, known for his research in the areas of comparative politics, social movements, political parties, collective action and political sociology.

#160

Bernard Harcourt

Bernard Harcourt

#3063

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Bernard E. Harcourt is an American critical theorist with a specialization in the area of punishment, surveillance, legal and political theory, and political economy. He also does pro-bono legal work on human rights issues.

#161

Charles Murray

#831

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Murray's work is highly controversial. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 discussed the American welfare system. In the book The Bell Curve , he and co-author Richard Herrnstein argue that in 20th century American society, intelligence became a better predictor than parental socioeconomic status or education level of many individual outcomes, including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, ...

#162

Yevgenia Albats

Yevgenia Albats

#3378

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. In 1986—1992, Albats worked as a columnist for Moskovskie Novosti. Since 1995, she has worked with the newspapers Izvestia, Novaya Gazeta and Kommersant. From 2004 to February 2022, she was the host of the author's program "Full Albats" on Echo of Moscow radio station. As of 2022, she works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine.

#163

Daniele Archibugi

Daniele Archibugi

#3525

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Daniele Archibugi is an Italian economic and political theorist. He works on the economics and policy of innovation and technological change, on the political theory of international relations and on political and technological globalisation.

#164

Audre Lorde

#522

Overall Influence

1934 - 1992 (58 years)

Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions".

#165

Roger Eatwell

#2122

Overall Influence

Roger Eatwell is a British academic currently an Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Bath. Since the late 1970s, Eatwell has engaged in research in fascism and populism. He defines fascism as a syncretic ideology, which could attract both the masses and intellectuals in some countries, and lead elites to think they could use radical fascism. It centered on three tropes: the need to create a holistic nation which transcended divisions; to forge a New Man elite and people fervently committed to this nation, and to build an authoritarian third way state . Eatwell has sought to dis...

#166

Larry Diamond

#6052

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Larry Jay Diamond is an American political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University's main center for research on international issues. At the Institute Diamond served as the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2009-2016. He was succeeded in that role by Francis Fukuyama and then Kathryn Stoner.

#167

Larry Bartels

#8982

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Larry Martin Bartels is an American political scientist and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and Shayne Chair in Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Bartels served as the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public Policy and International Relations and founding director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.

#168

Bruce Riedel

#4123

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Bruce O. Riedel is an American expert on U.S. security, South Asia, and counter-terrorism. He is currently a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He also serves as a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group.

#169

Brahma Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney

#8202

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Brahma Chellaney is an Indian geostrategist, public intellectual, columnist and author on geostrategic affairs. He is a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He was a member of India's National Security Advisory Board and an author of its draft nuclear doctrine. He is a regular columnist for Project Syndicate, and writes for numerous other international publications. He is the author of nine books on geostrategic affairs, of which Asian Juggernaut was a best-seller and Water: Asia's New Battleground received the $20,000 Bernard Schwartz Award.

#170

Brian Barry

#3346

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Brian Barry, was a moral and political philosopher. He was educated at the Queen's College, Oxford, obtaining the degrees of B.A. and D.Phil. under the direction of H. L. A. Hart. Along with David Braybrooke, Richard E. Flathman, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, he is widely credited with having fused analytic philosophy and political science. Barry also fused political theory and social choice theory and was a persistent critic of public choice theory.

#171

Robert Jervis

#4499

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Robert Jervis was an American political scientist who was the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Jervis was co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, a series published by Cornell University Press.

#172

Steven Levitsky

Steven Levitsky

#6253

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Steven Levitsky is an American political scientist and Professor of Government at Harvard University. A comparative political scientist, his research interests focus on Latin America and include political parties and party systems, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions. He is notable for his work on competitive authoritarian regimes and informal political institutions.

#173

Zhao Lijian

#4167

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (52 years)

Zhao Lijian is a Chinese civil servant who has been serving as deputy director of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China since January 2023. He joined the foreign service in 1996. Zhao became notable for his outspoken use of Twitter when he served as an envoy-level attaché at the Embassy of China in Pakistan from 2015 to 2019. From 2019 and 2023, he served as deputy director of the Information Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the 31st spokesperson of the Ministry. He has been described as a prominent wolf warrior diplomat during his tenure.

#174

Stansfield Turner

Stansfield Turner

#3014

Overall Influence

1923 - 2018 (95 years)

Stansfield Turner was an admiral in the United States Navy who served as President of the Naval War College , commander of the United States Second Fleet , Supreme Allied Commander NATO Southern Europe , and was Director of Central Intelligence under the Carter administration. A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford and the United States Naval Academy, Turner served for more than 30 years in the Navy, commanding warships, a carrier group, and NATO's military forces in southern Europe, among other commands.

#175

Éric Zemmour

#1071

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Éric Zemmour is a French far-right politician, essayist, writer and former political journalist and pundit. He was an editor and panelist on Face à l'Info, a daily show broadcast on CNews, from 2019 to 2021. He ran in the 2022 French presidential election, in which he placed fourth in the first round.

#176

Bianca Jagger

#2950

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Bianca Jagger is a Nicaraguan social and human rights advocate and a former actress. Jagger currently serves as a Council of Europe goodwill ambassador, founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, member of the Executive Director's Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA, and a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust.

#177

Khieu Samphan

#5298

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Khieu Samphan is a Cambodian former communist politician and economist who was the chairman of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, although Pol Pot remained the General Secretary in the party.

#178

David Shambaugh

David Shambaugh

#10897

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

David Shambaugh is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and director of the China Policy Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington DC. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

#179

Kathryn Sikkink

#6078

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Kathryn Sikkink is an author, human rights academic, and scholar of international relations working primarily through the theoretical strain of constructivism. She is currently a professor at Harvard Kennedy School.

#180

Ole Wæver

#9164

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Ole Wæver is a professor of international relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He has published and broadcast extensively in the field of international relations, and is one of the main architects of the so-called Copenhagen School in International Relations.

#181

Marc Lynch

#11001

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Marc Lynch is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, where he is also director of both the Institute for Middle East Studies and the Middle East Studies Program.

#182

Shlomo Avineri

#3219

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Shlomo Avineri was an Israeli political scientist. He was a professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He also served as a recurring visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest and a fellow at Munich-based academic think tank Centrum für angewandte Politikforschung, offering advice to politicians. Avineri died on 1 December 2023, at the age of 90.

#183

Gilles Kepel

#2480

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Gilles Kepel, is a French political scientist and Arabist, specialized in the contemporary Middle East and Muslims in the West. Considered as one of the world’s leading authorities on Political Islam and the Middle East, he is Professor at Sciences Po Paris, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres and director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Program at PSL, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. His latest english-translated book, Away from Chaos. The Middle East and the Challenge to the West was reviewed by The New York Times as “an excellent primer for anyone wanting to get up to speed on the region”.

#184

Gesine Schwan

#6775

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Gesine Schwan is a German political science professor and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The party has nominated her twice as a candidate for the federal presidential elections. On 23 May 2004, she was defeated by the Christian Democrat Horst Köhler. On 23 May 2009, Köhler beat her again to win his second term.

#185

Bassam Tibi

#6167

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Bassam Tibi , is a Syrian-born German political scientist and professor of international relations specializing in Islamic studies and Middle Eastern studies. He was born in 1944 in Damascus, Syria to an aristocratic family, and moved to West Germany in 1962, where he later became a naturalized citizen in 1976.

#186

Perry Link

#2711

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Eugene Perry Link, Jr. is Chancellorial Chair Professor for Innovative Teaching Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages in College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. Link is a Harvard University alumnus who received his B.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1976. Link has been a Board Member of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong since 2021. CFHK is a US-based non-profit organisation, which presses for the pre...

#187

Pippa Norris

#5036

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Pippa Norris is a British American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and she has served as the Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project.

#188

Thomas Risse

#7807

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Thomas Risse is a Berlin-based international relations scholar. He currently acts as chair of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science of Freie Universität Berlin. Furthermore, he has several engagements in German and international research networks, and heads the PhD program of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

#189

Wolfgang Ischinger

Wolfgang Ischinger

#6282

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Wolfgang Friedrich Ischinger is a German diplomat who served as chairman of the Munich Security Conference from 2008 to 2022. From 2001 to 2006, Ischinger was the German ambassador to the United States, and from 1998 to 2001, he was Staatssekretär in Berlin. He was Germany's ambassador to the Court of St. James's from 2006 to May, 2008. He was also Global Head of Government Relations of Allianz SE from March 2008 until December 2014. He serves on the supervisory board of Allianz Deutschland AG, on the European Advisory Board of Investcorp and on the governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

#190

Richard A. Falk

Richard A. Falk

#7128

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (94 years)

Richard Anderson Falk is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor's Chairman of the Board of Trustees. In 2004, he was listed as the author or coauthor of 20 books and the editor or coeditor of another 20 volumes. Falk has published extensively with multiple books written about international law and the United Nations.

#191

Gerhard Casper

#2762

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Gerhard Casper is a political scientist who is a former president of Stanford University from 1992 to 2000, a former Dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 1979 to 1987, and a former provost of the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1992. Casper was president of the American Academy in Berlin from July 2015 through July 2016; from August 2019 to January 24, 2020, he served as the institution's trustee-in-residence.

#192

Charles Beitz

#6460

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Charles R. Beitz is an American political theorist. He is Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he has been director of the University Center for Human Values and director of the Program in Political Philosophy. His philosophical and teaching interests focus on global political theory, democratic theory, the theory of human rights and theories of property.

#193

Partha Chatterjee

#5725

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Partha Chatterjee is an Indian political scientist and anthropologist. He was the director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta from 1997 to 2007 and continues as an honorary professor of political science. He is also a professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at Columbia University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

#194

James Farmer

#2283

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

James Leonard Farmer Jr. was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." He was the initiator and organizer of the first Freedom Ride in 1961, which eventually led to the desegregation of interstate transportation in the United States.

#195

Ian Lustick

#3822

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ian Steven Lustick is an American political scientist and specialist on the modern history and politics of the Middle East. He currently holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the department of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

#196

John King Fairbank

#6197

Overall Influence

1907 - 1991 (84 years)

John King Fairbank was an American historian of China and United States–China relations. He taught at Harvard University from 1936 until his retirement in 1977. He is credited with building the field of China studies in the United States after World War II with his organizational ability, his mentorship of students, support of fellow scholars, and formulation of basic concepts to be tested.

#197

Kenneth Lieberthal

#10239

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Kenneth Guy Lieberthal is an American professor and politician known as an expert on China's elite politics, political economy, domestic and foreign policy decision making, and on the evolution of US-China relations.

#198

R. Nicholas Burns

R. Nicholas Burns

#5049

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Robert Nicholas Burns is an American diplomat and academic who has served as the United States ambassador to China since 2022. Burns has had a 25-year career in the State Department, and served as United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Appointed by President George W. Bush, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 17, 2005, and was sworn into office by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As under secretary, he oversaw the bureaus responsible for U.S. policy in each region of the world and served in the senior career Foreign Service position at the department. He retired on April 30, 2008.

#199

Chantal Mouffe

#1359

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist, formerly teaching at University of Westminster. She is best known for her contribution to the development—jointly with Ernesto Laclau, with whom she co-authored her most frequently cited publication Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis, a type of post-Marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Leftist politics in terms of radical democracy. She is also the author of influential works on agonistic political theory, including Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically and The Democratic Paradox.

#200

Seyla Benhabib

#2392

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-born American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from 2002 to 2008.

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