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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#451
Werner Weidenfeld
#18631
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Werner Weidenfeld is a German political scientist. He was a political advisor for Germany–United States relations under different chancellors. He currently serves as rector of the Alma Mater Europaea.
Go to Profile#452
James McGann
#17975
Overall Influence
1955 - 2021 (66 years)
James G. McGann was an American academic who was a Senior Lecturer in International Studies, Founder and Director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was the author of numerous publications, including the renowned annual Global Go To Think Tank Index which ranks think tanks in all regions of the world. His most recent book was "Think Tanks: The New Knowledge and Policy Brokers in Asia" published by the Brookings Institution Press. Dr. McGann was most notable for his ...
Go to Profile#453
Abdurrahman Wahid
#11591
Overall Influence
1940 - 2009 (69 years)
Abdurrahman Wahid , though more colloquially known as Gus Dur , was an Indonesian politician and Islamic religious leader who served as the 4th president of Indonesia, from his election in 1999 until his removal from power in 2001. A long time leader within the Nahdlatul Ulama organization, he was the founder of the National Awakening Party . He was the son of Minister of Religious Affairs Wahid Hasyim, and the grandson of Nahdatul Ulama founder Hasyim Asy'ari. He had a visual impairment caused by glaucoma; he was blind in the left eye and partially blind in his right eye. He was the first an...
Go to Profile#454
Yascha Mounk
#9990
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Yascha Benjamin Mounk is a German-born American political scientist. He is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D. C. In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine devoted to defending the values of free societies.
Go to Profile#455
Charles V. Hamilton
#8682
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Charles Vernon Hamilton is a political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science at Columbia University. Biography Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. His family moved to the southside of Chicago, Illinois in 1935, which is where he was raised. He had aspirations to be a journalist growing up, but he was dissuaded as, in his words, “there [weren’t] many jobs for black people who want to be journalists.” He went to Roosevelt University to study political science and graduated in 1951, and went on to earn a master's degree in 1957 from the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#456
Mark J. Gasiorowski
#22019
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Mark J. Gasiorowski is a political scientist at Tulane University in New Orleans in the field of Middle East politics, Third World politics, and U.S. foreign policy. He has served frequently as a consultant to the United States Department of State. In 2003, following the September 11 attacks, he testified before the 9/11 Commission. Journalist and academic Stephen Kinzer has called him "the most persistent" of "a small but dedicated group of scholars [who] have devoted considerable effort to uncovering the truth about events surrounding the 1953 coup" in Iran, an event so important it "defin...
Go to Profile#457
Stuart R. Schram
#7908
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Stuart Reynolds Schram was an American physicist, political scientist and sinologist who specialised in the study of modern Chinese politics. He was particularly well known for his works on the life and thought of Mao Zedong.
Go to Profile#458
Philip D. Zelikow
#10661
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Philip David Zelikow is an American diplomat, academic and author. He has worked as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and counselor of the United States Department of State. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and was American Academy in Berlin Axel Springer Fellow, in the fall of 2009.
Go to Profile#459
William B. Quandt
#18102
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William B. Quandt is an American scholar, author, and professor emeritus in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He previously served as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and as a member on the National Security Council in the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations. He was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty. His areas of expertise include Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, and U.S. foreign policy.
Go to Profile#460
Anton Pelinka
#12748
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Anton Pelinka is a professor of political science and nationalism studies at the English-speaking Central European University of Budapest. Prior to this appointment, Pelinka was a professor of political science at the University of Innsbruck, one of Austria's largest universities. During his career he has also served as a dean, with his most recent tenure in this role occurring between the years of 2004 and 2006 when he was dean of the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Innsbruck.
Go to Profile#461
Bernt Hagtvet
#29372
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bernt Hagtvet is a Norwegian political scientist. He is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oslo. Among his areas of interest are European politics, extremist movements and human rights. He was born in Oslo and is married to historian Guri Hjeltnes. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was among the founders and stayed on as a board member at Human Rights House Foundation. He is now the interim chair of the board.
Go to Profile#462
Colin S. Gray
#12906
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Colin S. Gray was a British-American writer on geopolitics and professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, where he was the director of the Centre for Strategic Studies. In addition, he was a Senior Associate to the National Institute for Public Policy.
Go to Profile#463
Ann Elizabeth Mayer
#10675
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ann Elizabeth Mayer is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Ann E. Mayer has taught law courses on subjects comprising law and policy in international business, globalization and human rights, introductions to U.S. law, comparative law, and Islamic law in contemporary Middle Eastern legal systems.
Go to Profile#464
A. James Gregor
#4969
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Anthony James Gregor was an American political scientist and eugenicist and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, known for his research on fascism, Marxism, and national security.
Go to Profile#465
Donald Green
#15003
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Donald Philip Green is a political scientist and quantitative methodologist at Columbia University. Green's primary research interests lie in the development of statistical methods for field experiments and their application to American voting behavior.
Go to Profile#466
Susan Estrich
#4612
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Susan Estrich is an American lawyer, professor, author, political operative, and political commentator. She is known for serving as the campaign manager for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and for serving in 2016 as legal counsel to the former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.
Go to Profile#467
Nelson W. Polsby
#22045
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Nelson Woolf Polsby was an American political scientist. He specialized in the study of the United States presidency, the United States Congress and how governmental policies and practices evolve. Polsby was the Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the editor of the American Political Science Review from 1971–77 and the founding editor of the Annual Review of Political Science from 1998 until his death in 2007.
Go to Profile#468
Ezra Vogel
#7318
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Ezra Feivel Vogel was an American sociologist who wrote prolifically on modern Japan, China, and Korea. He was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. His 1978 book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America was a best-seller in both English and Japanese, and his 2011 book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China won the Lionel Gelber Prize.
Go to Profile#469
Richard Danzig
#6029
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Richard Jeffrey Danzig is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 71st Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton. He served as an advisor of the President Barack Obama during his presidential campaign and was later the chairman of the national security think-tank, the Center for a New American Security.
Go to Profile#470
Alan Cairns
#15503
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Hugh Alan Craig Cairns, was a Canadian political scientist and professor. His scholarship focused on diverse topics within Canadian politics, including federalism, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, electoral politics, the role of the courts, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and Indigenous issues. Cairns was a leading expert of federalism and governance, and his scholarship remains foundational in Canadian political science.
Go to Profile#471
Christian Welzel
#9203
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Christian Welzel is a German political scientist at the Leuphana University Lueneburg and director of research at the World Values Survey Association. He is known for the model of cultural dimensions which measures emancipative values and secular values.
Go to Profile#472
Barbara F. Walter
#17520
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Barbara F. Walter is an American political scientist who is the Rohr Professor of International affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terrorism. Walter is the author of numerous books and articles on these subjects. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and PBS, and has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. Walter has consulted for the World Bank, the Departments of Defense and State, the United Nations, and the January 6th Committee.
Go to Profile#473
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin
#15482
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin was an American political theorist. She was best known for her seminal study The Concept of Representation, published in 1967. Pitkin's diverse interests ranged from the history of European political thought from ancient to modern times, through ordinary language philosophy and textual analysis, to issues of psychoanalysis and gender in political and social theory.
Go to Profile#474
Matthew Goodwin
#8351
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Matthew James Goodwin is a British academic who is professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. His publications include National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy and Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.
Go to Profile#475
Ahron Bregman
#12458
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ahron "Ronnie" Bregman is a UK-based political scientist of Israeli origin, as well as a writer and journalist, specialising on the Arab–Israeli conflict. Biography Bregman was born and raised in Israel. He served in the Israel Defense Forces and as an artillery officer participated in the 1978 Litani campaign and the 1982 Lebanon War. After the war he left the army to study international relations and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also worked as a parliamentary assistant in the Knesset. After giving an interview in 1988 to the Haaretz newspaper declaring that ...
Go to Profile#476
Lilia Shevtsova
#20801
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Lilia Fyodorovna Shevtsova is a Kremlinology expert. Biography Shevtsova received B.A. and M.A. in history and journalism from Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1971. She also received Ph.D. in political science from the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1976. She served as director of the Center for Political Studies in Moscow, and as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies.
Go to Profile#477
Jerry F. Hough
#12372
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Jerry Fincher Hough was an American political scientist. Hough was the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University and his research focused on domestic American politics, the Soviet Union, the democratization of Russia, and American efforts at nation-building. Hough is a part of the "revisionist school" on Soviet history, maintaining that the level of terror was much exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was institutionally weak under Joseph Stalin, among other things. He saw the focus of his research and teaching as "the relationship of long term economic development and political institutions".
Go to Profile#478
Jendayi Frazer
#20929
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Jendayi Elizabeth Frazer is the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, heading the Bureau of African Affairs. She was a Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Department of Social and Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#479
Michael Aris
#15124
Overall Influence
1946 - 1999 (53 years)
Michael Vaillancourt Aris was a British historian who wrote and lectured on Bhutanese, Tibetan, and Himalayan culture and history. He was the husband of Aung San Suu Kyi, who would later become State Counsellor of Myanmar.
Go to Profile#480
Stefan Wolff
#18833
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Stefan Wolff is a German political scientist. He is a specialist in international security, particularly in the management, settlement and prevention of ethnic conflicts. He is currently Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Born in 1969, He studied as an undergraduate at the University of Leipzig and holds a Master's degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a PhD from the London School of Economics, where he studied under the supervision of Brendan O'Leary. His doctoral thesis, dated 2000, was titled Managing disputed territories, exte...
Go to Profile#481
Cody Keenan
#17898
Overall Influence
Cody Keenan is an American political advisor and speechwriter who served as the director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama. Keenan studied political science at Northwestern University. After graduation, he worked in the U.S. senate office of Ted Kennedy, before studying for a master's in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. After graduation, he took a full-time position on Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. In 2009, he assumed the position of deputy director of speechwriting. After Jon Favreau left the White House in 2013, Keenan took over as director of speechwrit...
Go to Profile#482
Frank Luntz
#4282
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Frank Ian Luntz is an American political and communications consultant and pollster, best known for developing talking points and other messaging for Republican causes. His work has included assistance with messaging for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and public relations support for pro-Israel policies in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect; including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax, and climate change instead of global warming.
Go to Profile#483
Kurt Waldheim
#10136
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Kurt Josef Waldheim was an Austrian politician and diplomat. Waldheim was the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981 and president of Austria from 1986 to 1992. While he was running for the latter office in the 1986 election, the revelation of his service in Greece and Yugoslavia, and participation in Nazi atrocities, as an intelligence officer in Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht during World War II, raised international controversy.
Go to Profile#484
Mark Galeotti
#9282
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Mark Galeotti is a British historian, lecturer and writer on transnational crime and Russian security affairs and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He is an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, and an associate fellow in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy.
Go to Profile#485
Stephen F. Jones
#18461
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stephen F. Jones is an English expert on post-Communist societies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who currently serves as Chair of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#486
Robert Gallucci
#15738
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert L. Gallucci is an American academic and diplomat, who formerly worked as president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He previously served as dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, from 1996 to June 2009. Prior to his appointment in 1996, for over two decades he had served in various governmental and international agencies, including the Department of State and the United Nations.
Go to Profile#487
Denis Sinor
#10920
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
Denis Sinor was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Central Asian Studies at the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University and a tenured lecturer at Cambridge University between 1948 and 1962, and was one of the world's leading scholars for the history of Central Asia. Under his directorship, the Central Asian Studies at Indiana University became one of the world's foremost centers for Central Asian history, languages and linguistics.
Go to Profile#488
Mark H. Moore
#10637
Overall Influence
Mark H. Moore is the Hauser Professor for Nonprofit Organizations and Faculty Chair of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also the author of a strategic management book called Creating Public Value.
Go to Profile#489
James S. Fishkin
#16784
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James S. Fishkin is an American political scientist and communications scholar. He holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where he serves as a professor of communication and, by courtesy, political science. He also acts as the director of Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab. Fishkin is widely cited for his work on deliberative democracy, with his proposition of Deliberative Polling in 1988 being particularly influential. Together with Robert Luskin, Fishkin's work has led to over 100 deliberative polls in 28 co...
Go to Profile#490
Benjamin K. Sovacool
#13209
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Benjamin K. Sovacool is an American academic who is director of the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University as well as Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University. He was formerly Director of the Danish Center for Energy Technology at the Department of Business Development and Technology and a professor of social sciences at Aarhus University. He is also professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex, where he formerly directed the Center on Innovation and Energy Demand and the Sussex Energy Group. He has written on energy policy, environmental issues, and science and technology policy.
Go to Profile#491
Margaret Levi
#24051
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Margaret Levi is an American political scientist and author, noted for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory, notably on the origins and effects of trustworthy government.
Go to Profile#492
Philip E. Tetlock
#7907
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Philip E. Tetlock is a Canadian-American political science writer, and is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#493
Jeffrey A. Winters
#15023
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey A. Winters is an American political scientist at Northwestern University, specialising in the study of oligarchy. He has written extensively on Indonesia and on oligarchy in the United States. His 2011 book Oligarchy was the 2012 winner of the American Political Science Association's Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative politics.
Go to Profile#494
Marshall Ganz
#12977
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Marshall Ganz is the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Introduced to organizing in the American civil rights movement, he worked on the staff of the United Farm Workers for sixteen years, became trainer and organizer for political campaigns, unions and nonprofit groups, and returned to Harvard where he earned his PhD in Sociology . He is credited with devising the successful grassroots organizing model and training for Barack Obama’s winning 2008 presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#495
George H. Kerr
#16150
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
George H. Kerr , also known in Taiwan as 葛超智 , was a United States diplomat during World War II, and in later years he was an author and an academic. His published works and archived papers cover "economic and political affairs in Taiwan in the 1930s and 1940s, Taiwan's transition from Japanese rule before and during World War II to postwar Chinese rule, Taiwanese rebellion against Chinese rule in 1947, and U.S. foreign policy toward Taiwan." His works also include "information about economic and political conditions in Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands after World War II."
Go to Profile#496
Svante Cornell
#15405
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Svante E. Cornell is a Swedish scholar specializing on politics and security issues in Eurasia, especially the South Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is a director and co-founder of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy , and Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program , and joined the American Foreign Policy Council as a Senior Fellow for Eurasia in January 2017.
Go to Profile#497
Eric Alterman
#6279
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Eric Alterman is an American historian, journalist, author, media critic, blogger, and educator. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of eleven books. From 1995 to 2020, Alterman was "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation. He is a contributing writer there, and at The American Prospect, where under a two-year grant he wrote the newsletter, Altercation, until January 27, 2023. In his farewell newsletter column Alterman stated that he opened a Substack page also entitled, Altercation, on January 21. 2023, and that although publi...
Go to Profile#498
Patricia Crone
#2898
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Patricia Crone was a Danish historian specialised in early Islamic history. Crone was a member of the Revisionist school of Islamic studies and questioned the historicity of the Islamic traditions about the beginnings of Islam.
Go to Profile#499
Paul Kelly
#13518
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul John Kelly is an Australian political journalist, author and television and radio commentator from Sydney. He has worked in a variety of roles, principally for The Australian newspaper and is currently its editor-at-large. Kelly also appears as a commentator on Sky News Australia and has written seven books on political events in Australia since the 1970s including on the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Recent works include The March of Patriots, which chronicles the creation of a modern Australia during the 1991–2007 era of prime ministers, Paul Keating and John Howard, and Trium...
Go to Profile#500
Gary Marks
#22197
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Gary Marks is an American-based academic and an expert on multilevel governance and the European Union. He is a Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a recurring Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence. Marks developed the concept of "multilevel governance.”
Go to Profile