The Most Influential People Across History

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people in Political Science,

#3101

Per Torsvik

#169248
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Per Torsvik was a Norwegian political scientist and media scholar. He held the mag.art. degree in political science, but is better known for founding media research in Norway. In 1958 he co-founded the Department of Press Research at the University of Oslo, and was the only employee for many years. He was later hired at the University of Bergen, at a "secretariat for media research" which was founded following a 1968 report written by Torsvik, Stein Rokkan and Leif Holbæk-Hanssen. The three wrote the book Medieforskning in 1972, and Torsvik also co-wrote a chapter in Rokkan's 1970 book Citizens, Elections, Parties and a chapter in the 1968 book Det norske samfunn.
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#3102

Georgi Bliznashki

#126857
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Georgi Petkov Bliznashki is a Bulgarian politician and a former Member of the European Parliament . He was a member of the Coalition for Bulgaria, part of the Party of European Socialists, and became and was an MEP from 1 January 2007 to June 2007 with the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union. He was born in Skravena, Sofia Oblast.
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#3103

Camille Froidevaux-Metterie

#101738
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Camille Froidevaux-Metterie is a French philosopher, researcher and professor of political science. Her work focuses on the transformations of the female condition in the contemporary era, in a phenomenological perspective that places the question of the body at the center of the reflection. Her work also focuses on women's reappropriation of their bodies as expressed in recent feminist movements dealing with issues related to intimacy and female genitality . In 2017, she was awarded the Chevalier de l'ordre national du Mérite.
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#3104

Emma Brossard

Emma Brossard
#114587
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Emma Beatriz Brossard was an American professor of politics and government at the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge and noted expert on the Venezuelan oil industry. She authored four monographs on the Venezuelan oil industry and its history. She was known for her criticisms of the Hugo Chavez administration and its policies in governing the Venezuelan oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima .
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#3105

William Burke-White

#112745
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
William Burke-White is an American law professor and policy advisor. He was the Inaugural Director of Perry World House, an interdisciplinary global policy research institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
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#3106

Lincoln Allison

#66322
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lincoln Allison is an English academic and essayist. Life and career Allison grew up in Colne, Lancashire, and was educated at Royal Grammar School, Lancaster, and at University and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford. He was a research scholar at Stanford University before taking up a position at the University of Warwick, where he taught from 1969 to 2004. Retired from full-time teaching, he is now Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in the politics of sport at the University of Brighton.
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#3107

S. N. Sangmpam

#154073
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
S. N. Sangmpam is a Congolese American professor, author, and political analyst. He teaches comparative political economy, international relations, and African American politics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University.
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#3108

Jack Hayward

#125837
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Jack Ernest Shalom Hayward FBA was an English writer and academic. Until his death, he was the Professor of Politics at the University of Hull. Published works
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#3109

Thomas J. Anton

#150673
Overall Influence
1934 - 2006 (72 years)
Thomas Julius Anton was an American professor of political science and dean of the faculty at Brown University. Anton graduated 1956 at Clark University, magna cum laude. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in politics at Princeton.
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#3110

Rose Ghorayeb

Rose Ghorayeb
#91968
Overall Influence
1909 - 2006 (97 years)
Rose Ghorayeb was a Lebanese writer, author, literary critic, and feminist. She was a professor of Arabic literature at the Lebanese American University and was frequently referred to as the "first female critic in Arabic literature". Regarded as a pioneer in aesthetic criticism, her literary career spanned more than 70 years and included many children stories, articles, biographies and plays.
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#3111

Robert L. Friedheim

#128386
Overall Influence
1934 - 2001 (67 years)
Robert Lyle Friedheim was an international relations scholar and professor at the University of Southern California. He was a former director of the USC School of International Relations. Biography Friedheim was born on August 1, 1934, in New York City. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University and doctorate in political science from University of Washington. He served in the United States Army in military intelligence.
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#3112

David A. M. Peterson

#144608
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
David A. M. Peterson is an American political scientist. He graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College and completed doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota in 2000. Peterson then taught at Texas A&M University until 2009, when he joined the Iowa State University faculty. In 2015, he succeeded Jeff Mondak and Tom Rudolph as editor of the journal Political Behavior. Peterson stepped down from as editor in 2019, and was replaced by Geoffrey Layman and Benjamin Radcliff. In 2020, Peterson was appointed to the Lucken Professorship in Political Science.
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#3113

Alastair Smith

#85962
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
Alastair Gibson Smith was a New Zealand academic in the field of library and information science. He retired in 2014 after spending most of his career at Victoria University of Wellington. Biography Smith obtained a BSc in physics from the University of Auckland, a Diploma in Teaching from Christchurch Teachers' College, a diploma from the New Zealand Library School and an MA from Victoria University of Wellington. He worked at the National Library of New Zealand, BRANZ and Victoria University of Wellington, where he rose to Senior Lecturer. He was appointed the inaugural general secretary of the Bicycle Association of New Zealand in 1979.
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#3114

Austin Frakt

#52184
Overall Influence
Austin B. Frakt is an American health economist who holds positions with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. He is widely known as the founder and co-editor-in-chief of The Incidental Economist. His academic research has been published in major academic journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs. Frakt supports the use of mainstream media as a means of translating academic research into policy relevance and has contributed to outlets including The New York Times and Bloomberg News. He serves on editorial bo...
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#3115

Peter Walker

#71509
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Peter Knight Walker was an Anglican bishop. Early life and education Walker was educated at Leeds Grammar School and The Queen's College, Oxford. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve . He was then a teacher at The King's School, Peterborough and Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood.
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#3116

Chang San-cheng

#84858
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Chang San-cheng is a Taiwanese politician who has been the mayor of Taoyuan City since 25 December 2022. He was Premier of Taiwan from 1 February 2016 until 20 May 2016, appointed by President Ma Ying-jeou. Before assuming the Premiership, he had served as Vice Premier from 8 December 2014 under the Mao Chi-kuo cabinet. Chang was the first nonpartisan Premier of Taiwan.
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#3117

Bronwyn Hayward

Bronwyn Hayward
#91829
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bronwyn Mary Hayward is a New Zealand political scientist. Her areas of research are democracy, sustainability and young people. She was a lead author on a United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report.
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#3118

George Friedman

George Friedman
#136564
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
George Friedman is a Hungarian-born U.S. geopolitical author on international affairs. He is the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures. Prior to founding Geopolitical Futures, he was chairman of the publishing company Stratfor.
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#3119

Joseph Sadan

Joseph Sadan
#36182
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Joseph Sadan is emeritus professor of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Tel-Aviv University. He has also taught and research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and research institutions in Europe, as well as at Haifa University and Menashe College. Sadan studied at the Hebrew University where he received his BA and MA degrees . Between 1965 and 1969/70 he worked on his Ph.D. thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris . The subject of the dissertation was furniture in the Middle East in medieval times. In 1989 he was promoted to Full Professor and retired in 2007. He held the Irene ...
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#3120

Zeng Shiqiang

#65767
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Zeng Shiqiang was a Chinese sinologist best known for studying I Ching, the oldest of the Chinese classics. Zeng is acclaimed as having been the "Father of the Chinese Style of Management". He served as president of Hsing Kuo University of Management and professor at National Chiao Tung University .
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#3121

Adrian Cioroianu

#99074
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Adrian Mihai Cioroianu is a Romanian historian, politician, journalist, and essayist. A lecturer for the History Department at the University of Bucharest, he is the author of several books dealing with Romanian history . He is also noted for his contribution as co-author of a high school textbook.
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#3122

Sarah Kreps

Sarah Kreps
#106768
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Dr. Sarah E. Kreps is an American political scientist, United States Air Force veteran, and policy analyst who focuses on U.S. foreign and defense policy. She is a professor of government at Cornell University, adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, and an adjunct scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute.
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#3123

Helge Hveem

#116427
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Helge Hveem is a Norwegian political scientist and politician for the Liberal Party. He was born in Bærum, and grew up at Økri farm. and graduated with the mag.art. degree in 1968. In 1965 he chaired the Norwegian Students' Society. He was employed at the University of Oslo in 1980, and was promoted to professor in 1992. He has written on international politics; notable books include International Relations and World Images , En ny økonomisk verdensordning og Norge , Complex Cooperation , Internasjonalisering og politikk and Makt og velferd i det globale samfunn .
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#3124

Ryszard Legutko

#100722
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Ryszard Antoni Legutko ; born 24 December 1949 Biography Under communism he was one of the editors of the samizdat quarterly "Arka". After the collapse of the communist regime he co-founded the Centre for Political Thought, which combines research, teaching, seminars and conferences and is also a publishing house. He has translated and written commentaries to Plato's Phaedo , Euthyphro and Apology . He is the author of several books: Plato’s Critique of Democracy , Toleration , A Treatise on Liberty and An Essay on the Polish Soul , Socrates .
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#3125

Frank Anechiarico

#117469
Overall Influence
Frank Anechiarico is Maynard-Knox Professor of Government and Law at Hamilton College. Books The pursuit of absolute integrity : how corruption control makes government ineffective
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#3126

Richard Kronick

#59445
Overall Influence
Richard Gray Kronick is an American health policy researcher and professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego , where he is also an adjunct professor of political science.
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#3127

Carolyn Bourdeaux

#123294
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Carolyn Jordan Bourdeaux is an American educator and politician who served as the U.S. representative from Georgia's 7th congressional district from 2021 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, she was a professor at the Andrew Young School of Public Policy at Georgia State University from 2003 to 2021.
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#3128

Anita Anand

#112271
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Anita Indira Anand is a Canadian lawyer and politician who has served as the president of the Treasury Board since 2023. She has represented the riding of Oakville in the House of Commons since the 2019 federal election, sitting as a member of the Liberal Party.
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#3129

Yvonne Galligan

Yvonne Galligan
#123569
Overall Influence
Yvonne Galligan OBE is an Irish political scientist and consultant who is currently teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin.
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#3130

Jessica Rawson

#33172
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Dame Jessica Mary Rawson, is an English art historian, curator and sinologist. She is also an academic administrator, specialising in Chinese art. After many years at the British Museum, she was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, from 1994 until her retirement in 2010. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at University of Oxford from 2006 for a term of five years.
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#3131

Diane Lamoureux

Diane Lamoureux
#85050
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Diane Lamoureux is a Canadian professor, essayist, and writer. She serves as Professor of Sociology in the Political Science Department of Laval University in Quebec. Her research focuses on the intersection of politics, sociology, and feminism.
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#3132

C. Edwin Baker

#67429
Overall Influence
1947 - 2009 (62 years)
C. Edwin Baker , the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was a leading scholar of constitutional law, communications law, and free speech.
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#3133

Piotr Balcerowicz

#86026
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Piotr Balcerowicz is an orientalist, philosopher, professor at University of Warsaw and founder of the Association Education for Peace. Biography He was active in the Federation of Government Secondary School of Torun, created in autumn 1980, occurring against indoctrination in schools, which has also been involved in organizing self-education action.
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#3134

Robert O. Work

Robert O. Work
#77010
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert Orton Work is an American national security professional who served as the 32nd United States Deputy Secretary of Defense for both the Obama and Trump administrations from 2014 to 2017. Prior to that, Work was the United States Under Secretary of the Navy from 2009 to 2013, and before that served as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps; Work retired in 2001 and worked as a civilian at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the George Washington University in various positions relating to military and strategic study. From 2013 to 2014, he was the CEO of the Center for a New American Security .
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#3135

Yasmin Fahimi

#94973
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Yasmin Fahimi is a German trade unionist and politician who has been chairing the German Trade Union Confederation since 2022. From 2017 to 2022, Fahimi served as a member of the German Bundestag. From January 2014 to December 2015 she was the general secretary of the Social Democratic Party .
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#3136

David Alan Grier

#139862
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
David Alan Grier is a writer active in the field of technology and social policy. He is associate professor of international science and technology policy and international affairs at George Washington University. As a professor, his area of expertise includes globalization, international standardization, scientific institutions, and the history of science. Publications include The Company We Keep. He writes the column Errant Hashtag for the IEEE magazine Computer. A series of podcasts also entitled "Errant Hashtag" discusses the correlation of technology, management, organization, and the society at large.
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#3137

William D. Coleman

#145770
Overall Influence
1950 - 2023 (73 years)
William D. Coleman was a Canadian political scientist. Until his death, he was a professor University of Waterloo, having previously been the IGI Chair and University Distinguished Professor at McMaster University.
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#3138

Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh

Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh
#99214
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh is an Iranian-American researcher, university lecturer, and United Nations consultant in peacebuilding, conflict resolution, counter-terrorism, and radicalization, best known for her work in "Human Security" and for contributions in the republics of Central Asia and Afghanistan, as cited by the New York Times and other publications as well as hundreds of scholarly publications. Currently, she is a lecturer at Sciences Po, researcher, and consultant to the United Nations.
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#3139

David Campbell

#126705
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
David Campbell is an Australian political scientist. He is known for his writing on photography and post-realism. Career David Campbell graduated with a PhD from the Australian National University in 1990.
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#3140

William Edwin Beckel

#99060
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
William Edwin Beckel was a Canadian academic and former president of Carleton University in Ottawa and the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. He was an early proponent of the use of television as a university teaching medium. He was born in Kingston, Ontario.
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#3141

Lorraine Minnite

#158144
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Lorraine Carol Minnite is a professor of political science, as well as an associate professor of public policy, at Rutgers University-Camden. Education Minnite received her bachelor's degree in history from Boston University, and her masters' and PhD degrees in political science from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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#3142

David E. Campbell

#67972
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
David Edward Campbell is a Canadian political scientist and is Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the founding director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy.
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#3143

John J. Pitney

#152905
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
John Jack Pitney, Jr. is an American political scientist. He is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Politics at Claremont McKenna College. Early life and education Pitney was born in 1955, the son of a milkman and a homemaker. He grew up on the west side of Saratoga Springs, New York, where his grandfather told him stories of local political corruption and he volunteered for Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. He attended Union College, graduating in 1977 as co-valedictorian. He received his doctorate in political science from Yale University in 1985; his dissertation focused on governmen...
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#3144

Su Jia-chyuan

#102572
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Su Jia-chyuan is a Taiwanese politician of the Democratic Progressive Party . As the first non-Kuomintang President of the Legislative Yuan, Su is an at-large legislator and previously Commissioner of Pingtung County, and held national posts as Minister of the Interior and Minister of Agriculture under President Chen Shui-bian's administration. From May to August 2020, he briefly served as Secretary General to the President under the Tsai Ing-wen administration.
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#3145

Claude Cadart

#62185
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Claude Cadart was a French sinologist and a specialist in the history of contemporary China. Together with his wife Cheng Yingxiang, he translated and published the memoirs of his father-in-law Peng Shuzhi, a dissident Trotskyist early leader of the Communist Party of China. He was one of the first European intellectuals to criticize Mao Zedong's political campaigns.
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#3146

Akın Ünver

#109404
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Hamid Akın Ünver is an assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, specializing in energy politics, conflict psychology and radicalization sociology. He also studies discourse theory, regional security complex theory and psychoanalytic approaches to decision-making and teaches courses on the politics of the Middle East, diplomatic history, energy security and security theory.
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#3147

Richard Longaker

#135971
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Richard Pancoast Longaker was an American political scientist, who was a professor at UCLA and a university administrator at Johns Hopkins University. Longaker was born in Philadelphia in 1924. He attended Amherst College in 1942, before serving in the U.S. military during World War II from 1943 to 1945. Longaker completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at Swarthmore College in 1949, and a Master of Arts degree in American history at the University of Wisconsin in 1950, where his thesis discussed Anti-Catholicism in the United States, 1919-1929. Longaker completed a PhD in political science in 1953 at Cornell University, where he was a student of presidential scholar Clinton Rossiter.
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#3148

José Ignacio Wert

#86383
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
José Ignacio Wert Ortega is a Spanish politician. On 22 December 2011 he was appointed Minister of Education, Culture and Sports by the president of the Spanish Government, Mariano Rajoy. He resigned on 25 June 2015 and was replaced by Íñigo Méndez de Vigo.
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#3149

Sharon Pardo

#98489
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sharon Pardo is an Israeli Professor of International Relations and a Jean Monnet Chair ad personam in European Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Biography Pardo was born in Haifa. He received his LL.B. and his LL.M. from the University of Sheffield's School of Law, and his Ph.D. from Ghent University, Faculty of Political and Social Studies. His doctoral thesis dealt with “The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership: From European Unilateralism to Regional Regime.”
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#3150

Ray Wolfinger

#121362
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Raymond Edwin Wolfinger was an American political scientist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He was best known as the co-author of an influential book on voter turnout, Who Votes. Prior to his tenure at Berkeley, he was on the faculty at Stanford University. In between this academic career he was an assistant to Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, for whom he helped manage passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Wolfinger was the source of the well-known aphorism, “The plural of anecdote is data.” He was a behavioral political scientist, an empiricist in search of better data a...
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