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,

#201

Ward Churchill

#2524

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ward LeRoy Churchill is an American author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1990 until 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government. His work features controversial views, written in a direct, often confrontational style. While Churchill has claimed Native American ancestry, genealogical research has failed to unearth such ancestry and he is not a member of a tribe.

#202

Richard N. Goodwin

Richard N. Goodwin

#4158

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Richard Naradof Goodwin was an American writer and presidential advisor. He was an aide and speechwriter to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He was married to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin for 42 years until his death in 2018 after a short bout with cancer. He was 86.

#203

Michael Lind

#2362

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Michael Lind is an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning with The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution . He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

#204

Carole Pateman

#3805

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Carole Pateman FBA FAcSS FLSW is a feminist and political theorist. She is known as a critic of liberal democracy and has been a member of the British Academy since 2007. Biography Pateman was born in Maresfield, Sussex, England. Educated at Lewes County Grammar School for Girls, she left at age 16. She entered Ruskin College, Oxford in 1963 studying economics, politics, history and sociology, achieving a distinction. She won a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read PPE, staying on to earn a DPhil.

#205

John W. Kingdon

#11818

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

John Wells Kingdon is Professor Emeritus and was Acting Chair of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Guggenheim fellow. He resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and as President of the Midwest Political Science Association, and has often been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings...

#206

Alfred Stepan

#7550

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Alfred C. Stepan was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion. He is known for his comparative politics research on the military, state institutions, democratization, and democracy.

#207

Karl Dietrich Bracher

#2989

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Karl Dietrich Bracher was a German political scientist and historian of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. Born in Stuttgart, Bracher was awarded a Ph.D. in the classics by the University of Tübingen in 1948 and subsequently studied at Harvard University from 1949 to 1950. During World War II, he served in the Wehrmacht and was captured by the Americans while serving in Tunisia in 1943. Bracher taught at the Free University of Berlin from 1950 to 1958 and at the University of Bonn since 1959. In 1951, Bracher married Dorothee Schleicher, the niece of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They had two chil...

#208

Raul Hilberg

#3273

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

Raul Hilberg was a Jewish Austrian-born American political scientist and historian. He was widely considered to be the preeminent scholar on the Holocaust. Christopher R. Browning has called him the founding father of Holocaust Studies and his three-volume, 1,273-page magnum opus, The Destruction of the European Jews, is regarded as seminal for research into the Nazi Final Solution.

#209

Vernon Bogdanor

Vernon Bogdanor

#4699

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Sir Vernon Bernard Bogdanor is a British political scientist, historian, and research professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King's College London. He is also emeritus professor of politics and government at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

#210

Jerry Pournelle

Jerry Pournelle

#475

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Jerry Eugene Pournelle was an American scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he worked in the aerospace industry, but eventually focused on his writing career. In an obituary in Gizmodo, he is described as "a tireless ambassador for the future."

#211

Colin Crouch

#4143

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Colin John Crouch, is an English sociologist and political scientist. He coined the post-democracy concept in 2000 in his book Coping with Post-Democracy. Colin Crouch is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.

#212

Robert Manne

#6057

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Robert Michael Manne is an Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a leading Australian public intellectual. Background Robert Manne was born in Melbourne to parents who were Jewish refugees from Europe. His earliest political consciousness was shaped by this fact and that both sets of grandparents were victims of The Holocaust. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford . He joined La Trobe University in Melbourne in its early years. He served there as a professor in politics and culture until retirement in 2012.

#213

Bob Jessop

#5271

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Bob Jessop is a British academic who has published extensively on state theory and political economy. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Work Jessop's major contribution to state theory is in treating the state not as an entity but as a social relation with differential strategic effects. This means that the state is not something with an essential, fixed property, such as a neutral coordinator of different social interests, an autonomous corporate actor with its own bureaucratic goals and interests, or the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie", as often described by pluralists, elitists/statists, and conventional Marxists, respectively.

#214

Martin Indyk

#6719

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Martin Sean Indyk is an American diplomat and foreign relations analyst with expertise in the Middle East. He was a distinguished fellow in International Diplomacy and later executive vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C from 2001-2018. He took leave from the Brookings Institution to serve as the U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli–Palestinian Negotiations from 2013 to 2014. He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

#215

Howard W. French

#5525

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Howard Waring French is an American journalist, author, and photographer, as well as professor since 2008 at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to re-entering academia, he was a longtime foreign correspondent and senior writer with The New York Times.

#216

Gerald Curtis

#11118

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Gerald L. Curtis is an American academic, a political scientist interested in comparative politics, Japanese politics, and U.S.-Japan relations. Columbia University Curtis was the Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University from 1998 until he retired in December 2015. He is now Burgess Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Columbia. Between 1974 and 1990, Curtis was head of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia.

#217

Sartaj Aziz

#4985

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (95 years)

Sartaj Aziz is a Pakistani economist and strategist, having previously served as the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of Pakistan, member of the federal cabinet as the de facto Minister for Foreign Affairs, a Federal Senator as well as the National Security Advisor.

#218

Robert Kagan

#5062

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Robert Kagan is an American neoconservative scholar. He is a critic of U.S. foreign policy and a leading advocate of liberal interventionism. A co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, he is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kagan has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for The Washington Post. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kagan left the Republican Party due to the party's...

#219

Ryan Crocker

#6211

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Ryan Clark Crocker is a retired American diplomat who served as a career ambassador within the United States Foreign Service. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he served as United States ambassador to Afghanistan , Iraq , Pakistan , Syria , Kuwait , and Lebanon . In January 2010, he became dean of Texas A&M University's George Bush School of Government and Public Service.

#220

Karel Vasak

#10850

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Karel Vasak or Karel Vašák was a Czech-French international official and university professor. Vasak was born in Czechoslovakia and later moved to France to study law. He decided to remain there after the Communist coup in Prague in February 1948. He acquired French citizenship and worked for the Council of Europe in several capacities.

#221

Adrian Zenz

#10144

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Adrian Nikolaus Zenz is a German anthropologist known for his studies of the Xinjiang internment camps and Uyghur genocide. He is a director and senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank established by the US government and based in Washington, DC.

#222

Ted Robert Gurr

#7702

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Ted Robert Gurr was an American author and professor of political science who most notably wrote about political conflict and instability. His widely translated book Why Men Rebel emphasized the importance of social psychological factors and ideology as root sources of political violence. He was Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and consulted on projects he established there. He died in November 2017.

#223

Jean Blondel

#7466

Overall Influence

1929 - 2022 (93 years)

#224

Andrea Dworkin

#838

Overall Influence

1946 - 2005 (59 years)

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.

#225

Donna Brazile

#2324

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (65 years)

Donna Lease Brazile is an American political strategist, campaign manager and political analyst who served twice as acting Chair of the Democratic National Committee . She is currently an ABC News contributor, and was previously a Fox News contributor until her resignation in May 2021. Brazile was also previously a CNN contributor, but resigned in October 2016, after WikiLeaks revealed that she shared two debate questions with Hillary Clinton's campaign during the 2016 United States presidential election.

#226

Barry Buzan

#4197

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Barry Gordon Buzan, FBA, FAcSS is a British political scientist. He is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a honorary professor at the University of Copenhagen and Jilin University. Until 2012 he was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the LSE. Buzan sketched the Regional Security Complex Theory and is therefore together with Ole Wæver a central figure of the Copenhagen School.

#227

Thomas E. Mann

#10253

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. He primarily studies and speaks on elections in the United States, campaign finance reform, Senate and filibuster reform, Congress, redistricting, and political polarization.

#228

Edward C. Banfield

Edward C. Banfield

#8717

Overall Influence

1916 - 1999 (83 years)

Edward Christie Banfield was an American political scientist, best known as the author of The Moral Basis of a Backward Society , and The Unheavenly City . His work was foundational to the advent of the policing tactic of broken windows theory, which was first advocated by his mentee James Q. Wilson in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled "Broken Windows".

#229

Larry Sabato

#3779

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

#230

Lucian Pye

#8646

Overall Influence

1921 - 2008 (87 years)

Lucian W. Pye was an American political scientist, sinologist and comparative politics expert considered one of the leading China scholars in the United States. Educated at Carleton College and Yale University, Pye chose to focus on the characteristics of specific cultures in forming theories of political development of modernization of Third World nations, rather than seeking universal and overarching theories like most political scientists. As a result, he became regarded as one of the foremost contemporary practitioners and proponents of the concept of political culture and political psychology.

#231

Martin Luther King III

Martin Luther King III

#3604

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (67 years)

Martin Luther King III is an American human rights activist, philanthropist and advocate. The oldest son of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, King served as the 4th President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1997 to 2004.

#232

Dore Gold

#6862

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Dore Gold is an American-Israeli political scientist and diplomat who served as Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999. He is currently the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was also an advisor to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office. In May 2015, Netanyahu named him Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position he held until October 2016.

#233

Vali Nasr

#5340

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Vali Reza Nasr is an Iranian-American academic and author, specializing in the Middle East and the Islamic world. He is Majid Khaddouri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as the eighth dean of the school from 2012 to 2019. Nasr is also a Non-Resident Fellow in South Asia at Atlantic Council and is described by The Economist as "a leading world authority on Shia Islam".

#234

H. George Frederickson

#13997

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

H. George Frederickson was born in Twin Falls, Idaho. He was a generalist in the field of public administration with particular interests in public things, theories of public administration, systems of multi-level governance, and American local government. He served as the Edwin O. Stene Distinguished Professor of Public Administration at the University of Kansas. He was President Emeritus of Eastern Washington University until 1987 and served as President of the American Society for Public Administration] . Frederickson was the founding editor of the Journal of Public Affairs Education and...

#235

Svetlana Gannushkina

Svetlana Gannushkina

#12104

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Svetlana Alekseevna Gannushkina is a mathematician and human rights activist in Russia who was reported to have been a serious contender for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Gannushkina became well-known in Russia as a human rights defender in 1990s when many conflicts broke in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Her human rights work dedicated especially to help refugees, internally displaced persons, victims of war.

#236

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#1743

Overall Influence

1925 - 2008 (83 years)

William Frank Buckley Jr. was an American conservative writer, public intellectual, and political commentator. In 1955, he founded National Review, the magazine that stimulated the conservative movement in the mid-20th century United States. Buckley hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line , the longest-running public affairs show with a single host in American television history, where he became known for his distinctive Transatlantic accent and wide vocabulary.

#237

David Gergen

#2966

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

David Richmond Gergen is an American political commentator and former presidential adviser who served during the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. He is currently a senior political analyst for CNN and a professor of public service and the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. Gergen is also the former editor at large of U.S. News & World Report and a contributor to CNN.com and Parade Magazine. He has twice been a member of election coverage teams that won Peabody awards—in 1988 with MacNeil–Lehrer, a...

#238

Peter J. Katzenstein

#6450

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Peter Joachim Katzenstein FBA is a German-American political scientist. He is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. Katzenstein has made influential contributions to the fields of comparative politics, international relations, and international political economy.

#239

Vincent Ostrom

#8029

Overall Influence

1919 - 2012 (93 years)

Vincent Alfred Ostrom was an American political economist and the Founding Director of the Ostrom Workshop based at Indiana University and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of Political Science. He and his wife, the political economist Elinor Ostrom, made numerous contributions to the field of political science, political economy, and public choice.

#240

Ira Katznelson

#6589

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Ira I. Katznelson is an American political scientist and historian, noted for his research on the liberal state, inequality, social knowledge, and institutions, primarily focused on the United States. His work has been characterized as an "interrogation of political liberalism in the United States and Europe—asking for definition of its many forms, their origins, their strengths and weaknesses, and what kinds there can be".

#241

Mohammad Khatami

Mohammad Khatami

#4423

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#242

Mehrangiz Kar

#11898

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (80 years)

Mehrangiz Kar , a human rights lawyer from Iran, is an internationally recognized writer, speaker and activist who advocates for the defense of women’s and human rights in Iran and throughout the Islamic world. A common theme in her work is the tension between Iranian law and the core principles of human rights and human dignity. She is also author of the book Crossing the Red Line, and an activist of women's rights in Iran. Born in 1944 at Ahvaz, in southern Iran, she attended the College of Law and Political Science at Teheran University. After graduating, she worked for Sazman-e Ta’min-e Ej...

#243

Kellyanne Conway

Kellyanne Conway

#2224

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Kellyanne Elizabeth Conway is an American political consultant and pollster, who served as Senior Counselor to the President in the administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020. She was previously Trump's campaign manager, having been appointed in August 2016; Conway is the first woman to have run a successful U.S. presidential campaign. She has previously held roles as campaign manager and strategist in the Republican Party, and was formerly president and CEO of the Polling Company/WomanTrend.

#244

Roger Hilsman

#6730

Overall Influence

1919 - 2014 (95 years)

Roger Hilsman Jr. was an American soldier, government official, political scientist, and author. He saw action in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, first with Merrill's Marauders, getting wounded in combat, and then as a guerilla leader for the Office of Strategic Services. He later became an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and briefly to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department while he served as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1961 to 1963 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1963 to 1964.

#245

Walter Laqueur

#3729

Overall Influence

1921 - 2018 (97 years)

Walter Ze'ev Laqueur was a German-born American historian, journalist and political commentator. He was an influential scholar on the subjects of terrorism and political violence. Biography Walter Laqueur was born in Breslau, Lower Silesia, Germany , into a Jewish family. In November 1938 he left Germany, immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, were murdered in the Holocaust. After less than a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he left to work as an agricultural laborer and guard. In 1942 he became a member of kibbutz HaZore'a.

#246

Edward Luttwak

#3135

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Edward Nicolae Luttwak is an American author known for his works on grand strategy, military strategy, geoeconomics, military history, and international relations. He is best known for being the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. His book Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, also published in Chinese, Russian and ten other languages, is widely used at war colleges around the world. His books are currently published in 29 languages besides English.

#247

Atul Kohli

#12424

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Atul Kohli is a professor of politics and international affairs at Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Education and Career Kohli was promoted to full professor in 1991, and was also appointed as David K.E. Bruce Professor of International Affairs at Princeton in 2002. Kohli is also the Editor in Chief of the journal of World Politics. In addition, he served as the Vice President of the American Political Science Association from 2009 to 2010.

#248

Francis Boyle

#9401

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Francis Anthony Boyle is an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He has served as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina and has supported the rights of Palestinians and indigenous peoples.

#249

Andreas Umland

#9785

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

#250

James Anaya

#8778

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Stephen James Anaya is an American lawyer and the 16th Dean of the University of Colorado Boulder Law School. He was formerly the James J. Lenoir Professor of Human Rights Law and Policy at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law and previously served for more than ten years on the faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law. In March 2008, he was appointed by the United Nations as its Special Rapporteur on the situation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, replacing Rodolfo Stavenhagen. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical...

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