The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#2001
Nancy Halliday Ely-Raphel
#42904
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Nancy Halliday Ely-Raphel is an American diplomat. She was the United States Ambassador to Slovenia from 1998 to 2001. From 2001 to 2003, she was the first Director of the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
Go to Profile#2002
Robert Kelly
#67258
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Robert E. Kelly is an American political analyst on inter-Korean affairs and associate professor in political science at Pusan National University. In March 2017, he and his family rose to fame when his live interview on BBC World News was sequentially gatecrashed by his children and wife.
Go to Profile#2003
Michael Gerhardt
#27499
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael J. Gerhardt is the Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Center on Law and Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an expert on constitutional law, separation of powers, and the legislative process. He is a Scholar in Residence at the National Constitution Center and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. On December 2, 2019, it was announced that Gerhardt would testify before the House Judiciary Committee regarding th...
Go to Profile#2004
Ajay Skaria
#61020
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Ajay Skaria is a scholar of South Asian Politics and History and is associated with Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies. He is currently teaching at University of Minnesota in the Department of History.
Go to Profile#2005
Tahir Amin
#53478
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Tahir Amin was a Pakistani political scientist who served as the vice chancellor of Bahauddin Zakariya University, in Multan, Pakistan. Amin also held additional charge of the vice chancellor of Women University Multan.
Go to Profile#2006
Isabell Lorey
#61415
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Isabell Lorey is a political theorist at the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies and professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Kassel. Education In 1996, Lorey graduated from the University of Tübingen. Her dissertation, which focused on subjectivity construction in the philosophy of Judith Butler as well as its political and theoretical implications for feminist theory, later became her first book.
Go to Profile#2007
Margaret Weir
#64796
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Margaret M. Weir is an American political scientist and sociologist, best known for her work on social policy and the politics of poverty in the United States, particularly at the levels of state and local government.
Go to Profile#2008
Paul R. Abramson
#82318
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Paul Robert Abramson was an American political scientist known for his research and writing on American, European, and Israeli elections. He was a professor of political science at Michigan State University.
Go to Profile#2009
Jennifer Clapp
#80349
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jennifer Ann Clapp is a Canadian political economist. She is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. Education Clapp earned her Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Michigan and her master's degree and PhD in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#2010
Bruce Jentleson
#79026
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Bruce W. Jentleson is a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, where he served from 2000 to 2005 as Director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. He previously was a professor at the University of California, Davis and Director of the UC Davis Washington Center. In addition to his academic career, he has served in a number of foreign policy positions in Democratic administrations.
Go to Profile#2011
Gordon Smith
#73922
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Gordon Smith was a British lecturer, professor and political scholar in the field of German and comparative European politics, who served as Head of Department for Government at the London School of Economics. He is said to have been one of Britain's leading scholars of comparative European politics.
Go to Profile#2012
Ruben Armiñana
#63569
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ruben Armiñana is a political scientist who served as the sixth president of Sonoma State University from 1992 to 2016. He is the first Cuban-American to head a campus in the California State University system.
Go to Profile#2013
Kang-i Sun Chang
#30370
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Kang-i Sun Chang , is a Chinese-born American sinologist. She is a scholar of classical Chinese literature. She is the inaugural Malcolm G. Chace Professor, and former chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University.
Go to Profile#2014
Said Sheikh Samatar
#34249
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Said Sheikh Samatar was a prominent Somali scholar and writer. Biography Early years Said was born in 1943 in the Ogaden in Ethiopia to Faduma and Sheikh Samatar. He came from a large family consisting of fourteen people, including his father's second wife. He hailed from Fiqi Ismaciil a subclan of Leelkase Tanade Daarood.
Go to Profile#2015
Shelley H. Metzenbaum
#66735
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Shelley Hope Metzenbaum is an American nonprofit executive, academic, and former government official specializing in public sector performance management. She was the founding president of the Volcker Alliance and worked in the Office of Management and Budget during the Obama administration. Metzenbaum is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Go to Profile#2016
Anand Menon
#39450
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King's College London in the United Kingdom and was appointed in January 2014 as director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative. He was a special adviser to the House of Lords EU committee.
Go to Profile#2017
Ernst ten Heuvelhof
#67828
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ernst Frederik ten Heuvelhof is a Dutch organizational theorist, and professor of public administration at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology, and professor of public administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is known for his work on process management, policy analysis and complex decision making.
Go to Profile#2018
William D. Berry
#85108
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
William Dale Berry is the Syde P. Deeb Eminent Scholar in Political Science and Marian D. Irish Professor of Political Science at Florida State University. His research analyzes the impact of electoral competition on the policy choices made by state legislatorss, and the effect of state welfare policy on poverty in the United States. Berry's research on methodology focuses on the development of techniques for estimating econometric models with binary dependent variables, and methods for studying policy diffusion using geographical information systems.
Go to Profile#2019
Kyrsten Sinema
#41588
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Kyrsten Lea Sinema is an American politician and former social worker serving as the senior United States senator from Arizona, a seat she has held since 2019. A former member of the Democratic Party, Sinema became an independent in December 2022.
Go to Profile#2020
Luis Guillermo Solís
#58493
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera is a Costa Rican politician and educator who was the 47th President of Costa Rica from 2014 to 2018. He is a member of the Citizens' Action Party . Solís led the field in the 2014 presidential election, and won the presidency in a landslide election, earning more votes than any presidential candidate in the history of the nation. Solís has a long academic and political career, culminating in his election as the first President of Costa Rica to be a member of the PAC. Since May 2017, Luis Guillermo Solis has been under fire after a report accused him of corruptly ex...
Go to Profile#2021
Nikolas Gvosdev
#70583
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Nikolas Kirrill Gvosdev is a Russian–American international relations scholar. He is currently professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College and the former Editor of the bi-monthly foreign policy journal, The National Interest. He writes as a specialist on US foreign policy as well as international politics as they affect Russia and its neighbors. He currently serves as editor of the journal Orbis.
Go to Profile#2022
Richard Labunski
#62241
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Richard Labunski is an American journalism professor at the University of Kentucky and newspaper columnist who is an outspoken advocate for reforming the United States Constitution in his book The Second Constitutional Convention. He has been a critic of voter apathy, low voter turnout, and excessive campaign spending. Labunski's book James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights argued that Madison was initially lukewarm to the idea of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, but later came to energetically support the ten amendments and worked hard for their inclusion. He has called f...
Go to Profile#2023
Robert M. Stein
#65137
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert M. Stein is an American political scientist and Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of political science at Rice University. He is an expert in urban politics and public policy. He co-authored Perpetuating the Pork Barrel: Policy Subsystems and American Democracy and authored Urban Alternatives: Public and Private Markets in the Provision of Local Services .
Go to Profile#2024
Flora Botton
#33118
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Flora Botton Beja is a Mexican sinologist and gender studies scholar. She was born in Greece, but acquired Spanish nationality through her parents and naturalized as Mexican after her arrival in Mexico in 1949. She was a co-founder of the gender studies and a pioneer of Oriental studies programs at El Colegio de México. She was one of the first academics to focus on China in Mexico and Latin America. Her works have widely been influential in the region and she was one of the founders of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios de Asia y África .
Go to Profile#2025
Arthur Hertzberg
#20185
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Arthur Hertzberg was a Conservative rabbi and prominent Jewish-American scholar and activist. Biography Avraham Hertzberg was born in Lubaczów, Poland, the eldest of five children, and left Europe in 1926 with his mother and grandmother to join his father in the United States, where his name was Americanized to Arthur. Hertzberg recalled that as a teenager in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, he would not accept the notion that the literary world of talmudic learning, the kabbalistic books and the writing of the chasidim were less worthy as compared to the Iliad, the Odyssey or Dante's Inferno.
Go to Profile#2027
Hillel Frisch
#76459
Overall Influence
Hillel Frisch is an Israeli political scientist and professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern History at Bar Ilan University. His work focuses on Israeli-Palestinian interactions and military strategies, the political impact of Islam, institutions and the military, the political dynamics of the Israeli Arab community, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, the Jordanian-Palestinian relationship, and Islamism.
Go to Profile#2028
Geoffrey Kemp
#89000
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Geoffrey Kemp is a British-American academic and writer on international relations. He is the Director of Regional Strategic Programs at the Center for the National Interest, and has held posts in academia and in the U.S. Government.
Go to Profile#2029
Preston King
#58235
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Preston Theodore King is an American academic and African-American civil rights activist. He taught extensively in universities in the United Kingdom, nations of Africa, Australia and, finally, the United States.
Go to Profile#2030
Alvin Thornton
#64111
Overall Influence
Alvin Thornton is an American university administrator. He serves as Associate Provost and directs Howard University's Amgen Scholars Program and is coordinator of its Leadership Alliance Program. He has been a member of the Howard University Political Science faculty for 26 years. He chairs the political science department. Thornton serves as Senior Academic Advisor to the President of Howard University.
Go to Profile#2031
Catherine McArdle Kelleher
#66391
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
Catherine McArdle Kelleher was an American political scientist involved in national and international security policy. She was Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and College Park Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Kelleher was the Director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin from 1998 to 2001 when she was appointed Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College . In the 1990s she was appointed Honorarprofessor at the Free University of Berlin, and she regularly taught at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland f...
Go to Profile#2032
Peter C. Bishop
#32864
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Peter C. Bishop is a professional futurist , a retired Associate Professor of Strategic Foresight, and the former Director of the graduate program in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. Early career In 1968, Bishop received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from St. Louis University where he also studied mathematics and physics. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri where he was a member of the Society of Jesus for seven years. From Michigan State University, he received an M.A. in 1971 and a Ph.D. in 1974. Bishop started teaching at Georgia Southern College in 1973 where he speciali...
Go to Profile#2033
Ken Rutherford
#52268
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kenneth R. Rutherford is co-founder of the Landmine Survivors Network and an American researcher in the field of political science. International work While studying political science at the University of Colorado in the mid-1980s, Rutherford decided to work in international development. Since graduating in 1985, he has worked for international aid agencies in Bosnia, Kenya, Mauritania, Senegal and Somalia, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Jordan.
Go to Profile#2034
Leontine T. Kelly
#32681
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Leontine Turpeau Current Kelly was an American bishop of the United Methodist Church. She was the second woman elevated to the position of bishop within the United Methodist Church, and the first African American woman.
Go to Profile#2035
Giorgio Galli
#43394
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Giorgio Galli was an Italian political scientist, historian, and academic. Biography Born in Milan on 10 February 1928, he graduated in Law and was a professor of History of Political Doctrines at the University of Milan. He was one of the most successful Italian political scientists, and devoted much of his work to the analysis of the Italian political system, adopting methodologies borrowed from the social sciences.
Go to Profile#2036
Lyn Ragsdale
#48652
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lyn Ragsdale was an American political scientist. She was the Radoslav A. Tsanoff professor of public affairs, professor of political science, and Dean of Social Sciences at Rice University. She specialized in the American presidency, the United States Congress, and electoral behavior. Ragsdale died suddenly at home on December 13, 2020.
Go to Profile#2037
Oyeleye Oyediran
#63188
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dr. Oyeleye Oyediran is a noted Nigerian political scientist. A former Fulbright scholar, and a native of Ogbomosho in Oyo State, he has edited books like, Nigerian Government and Politics Under Military Rule, 1966-1979 and Survey of Nigerian Affairs, 1973-1977 and 1978-1979. He has remained a faculty at the Center for International Studies, at the East Carolina University, and Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, .
Go to Profile#2038
Laurence Thompson
#59325
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Laurence G. Thompson was a World War II veteran, sinologist, classical violinist and professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California. Biography Thompson was born in 1920 in the Shandong province of Republic of China, and lived there until age 14. As a young man, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and worked as a Japanese-language interpreter. During World War II, he fought in the South Pacific. His name back in the day was wee rumpy because of his dashing height.
Go to Profile#2039
Kenneth E. Thorpe
#33473
Overall Influence
Kenneth E. Thorpe is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Health Policy at Emory University, the Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Rollins School of Public Health, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services . He is also the Executive Director of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease and the Emory Institute for Advanced Policy Solutions.
Go to Profile#2040
David A. Caputo
#33186
Overall Influence
David Armand Caputo became the sixth president of Pace University in 2000. He serves as co-chair of the New York State Regents' Professional Standards and Practices Board, as a director of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, on the Council of Presidents of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and as a director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Westchester Arts Council. Caputo also serves on the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#2041
Clifford Mayes
#11533
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
A Jungian scholar, Mayes has produced the first book-length studies in English on the pedagogical applications of Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, which is based on the work of Carl Gustav Jung . Jungian psychology is also called analytical psychology. Mayes' work, situated in the humanities and depth psychology, is thought to offer an alternative to the social sciences model.
Go to Profile#2042
Bohdan Krawchenko
#68624
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bohdan Krawchenko is the former director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the University of Alberta, Canada. and former vice-rector of the National Academy for Public Administration under the President of Ukraine in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Go to Profile#2043
Sheldon Danziger
#59423
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sheldon H. Danziger is an American economist, focusing in trends in poverty and inequality, and the effects of economic and demographic changes and government social programs on disadvantaged groups, currently the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at University of Michigan and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also the President of Russell Sage Foundation.
Go to Profile#2044
Andranik Migranyan
#65680
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Andranik Migranyan is an Armenian-born Russian politologist, who works as a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Academy He holds a PhD degree from the Institute of International Labor Movement, Soviet Academy of Sciences, Moscow. Andranik Migranyan has been a visiting fellow at Harriman Institute, Columbia University; San Diego State University. He is an author of a number of articles, books, hundreds of publications.
Go to Profile#2045
Claudine Gay
#24877
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Claudine Gay is an American political scientist serving as the 30th president of Harvard University. Assuming office in 2023, she became the university's first black president 368 years after its founding.
Go to Profile#2046
Alejandro Foxley
#54826
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Alejandro Tomás Foxley Rioseco is a Chilean economist and politician. He was the Foreign Minister of Chile from 2006 to 2009 and previously served as Minister of Finance from 1990 to 1994 and leader of the Christian Democrat Party from 1994 to 1996.
Go to Profile#2047
Bjørn Erik Rasch
#48013
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Bjørn Erik Rasch is an alumnus of the University of Oslo , where he has been a Professor since 1994. He was a researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research 1990–94. He was formerly joint editor of Norsk Statsvitenskapelig Tidsskrift. He has been guest lecturer at the University of California San Diego , Harvard University and Columbia University.
Go to Profile#2048
Sergey Glazyev
#60958
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sergey Yurievich Glazyev is a Russian politician and economist, member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia, and, since 2008, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Glazyev was minister of Foreign Economic Relations in Boris Yeltsin's cabinet from 1992 to 1993, a member of the State Duma from 1993 to 2007, one of the leaders of the electoral block Rodina from 2003 to 2004, a candidate for the Presidency of the Russian Federation in 2004, and advisor to the president of the Russian Federation on regional economic integration from 2012 to 2019. As of 2021, he is t...
Go to Profile#2049
Job Cohen
#46340
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Marius Job Cohen is a retired Dutch politician and jurist who served as Mayor of Amsterdam from 2001 to 2010 and Leader of the Labour Party from 2010 to 2012. Cohen studied Law at the University of Groningen obtaining a Master of Laws degree. Cohen worked as researcher at the Leiden University before finishing his thesis and graduated as a Doctor of Law in Jurisprudence. Cohen worked as a professor of jurisprudence at the State University of Limburg from September 1983 until June 1993, he also served as Rector Magnificus of the State University of Limburg from January 1991. Cohen was appoint...
Go to Profile#2050
Sophie Meunier
#60856
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sophie Meunier is a senior research scholar in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs . She is the Director of Princeton's Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society and the Co-director of the European Union Program at Princeton, which she founded with Andrew Moravcsik. She was elected Chair of the European Union Studies Association, the world's premier scholarly association for the study of the European Union and the process of European integration . A Franco-American political scientist, she is an expert in European ...
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