Top 30 Famous People Who Majored in Political Science (#30 to #21)

I finished my degree in Bachelor’s degree in Political Science at MSU-IIT in 2009. A couple of weeks ago, I searched the net for a list of people who also had the same major, but to my dismay, I found none.

I then took the matters into my own hands and single-handedly searched the educational background of some famous people whom I discovered having Political Science degrees. Together with law, these degrees seem to be the most popular for current and aspiring politicians, but the fact is, people pursue to all sorts of careers afterwards.

So here’s My List of Thirty Famous People Who Majored in Political Science (#30 to #21). You might want to check out those who made it to the 20th to 11th spots, here. While the Top 10 can be read, here. And as how we chant it at MSU-IIT - Sikhai PolSci!

30. Michele Bachmann

United States Representative Michele Marie Bachmann was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, winning the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011. But she dropped out in January 2012 after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses.

Before taking up law in 1986, earned her Bachelor’s degrees in English and Political Science in 1978.

 

29. Howard Dean

Howard Dean was the former Governor of Vermont, and for his 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. Dean’s political career was launched after he led a campaign to stop a condo development on Lake Champlain, succeeding in building a bike trail instead. He earned his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, after earning a BA in Political Science from Yale.

 

28. David Axelrod

David M. Axelrod is an American political consultant based in Chicago, Illinois. He was a top political advisor to President Bill Clinton as well as campaign advisor to President Barack Obama during Obama's successful run for Presidency. Following the 2008 election, Axelrod was appointed as Senior Advisor to Obama. Axelrod left the White House position in early 2011 to become the Senior Strategist for Obama's re-election campaign.

Axelrod was formerly a political writer for the Chicago Tribune. He is the founder of AKPD Message and Media, and operated ASK Public Strategies, now called ASGK Public Strategies. After graduating from New York's Stuyvesant High School in 1972, Axelrod attended the University of Chicago. He majored in political science.

27. Francis Fukuyama

Another political scientist is  (or Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama), born on October 27, 1952. He is also a political economist and author. He’s best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. He initially pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale University, going to Paris for six months to study under Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, but became disillusioned and switched to political science at Harvard University.

 

26. Stéphane Dion

Stéphane Maurice Dion, PC, is a Canadian politician who has been the Member of Parliament for the riding of Saint-Laurent–Cartierville in Montreal since 1996. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons from 2006 to 2008. Dion resigned as Liberal leader after the party's defeat in the 2008 general election, but remained in Parliament and was re-elected in his riding in the 2011 election.

Dion is a former academic who served as a cabinet minister under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin and, as such, is a Member of the Privy Council. He studied political science at Université Laval in the department co-founded by his father; this was also where he met his future wife, Janine Krieber, a fellow-student in the same program. He obtained BA and MA degrees in 1977 and 1979 respectively (his master's thesis presented an analysis of the evolution of Parti Québécois electoral strategies), after which he and Janine departed together for France.

 

25. Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom was a renowned American political economist. She was awarded the 2009 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. She was the first, and to date, the only woman to win the prize in this category. Ostrom graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1951 and then received a B.A. (with honors) in political science at UCLA, in 1954. She was awarded an M.A. in 1962 and a PhD in 1965, both from UCLA Department of Political Science. She married a fellow political scientist, Vincent Ostrom in 1963.

 

24. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author and former associate professor of political science and social studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and A Moral Reckoning (2002). He is also the author of Worse Than War (2009), which examines the phenomenon of genocide.

23. Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization. He received a BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University and a PhD in political science from Yale.

 

22. Robert Keohane

Robert Keohane is an American academic, who, following the publication of his influential book After Hegemony in 1984, became widely associated with the theory of neoliberal institutionalism in international relations.

Keohane has taught at Swarthmore, Stanford, Brandeis, Harvard, and Duke. At Harvard he was Stanfield Professor of International Peace, and at Duke he was the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science. He is currently a Professor of Political Science at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

 

21. Rick Santorum

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. He got his Bachelor’s degree in political science in 1980 at the Pennsylvania State University and then took Law in 1986 at the Dickinson School of Law.

Other runner-ups include:

Charles Beard† was a professor of Political Science at Columbia University from 1907 to 1917, when he resigned to protest the dismissal, during World War I, of several professors at Columbia who held pacifist views. In 1918 Beard helped found the New School for Social Research, an institution for adult education in New York City.

The Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson also earned his bachelor’s degree in political science in 1975 at the University of New Mexico.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo, and Professor in the Centre for Environment and Business in the Faculty of Environment, with a cross-appointment to the Political Science Department in the Faculty of Arts. He previously held the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

In 1980, he received a B.A. in Political Science from Carlton University in Ottawa. He then established the Canadian Student Pugwash organization, a movement that provided Canadian university students with a forum for discussion of issues of science, ethics, and public policy.

Gary King is a political scientist and quantitative methodologist. He is currently the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and Director for the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In 1980, King graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Political Science from the State University of New York at New Paltz. In 1981 he earned an M.A. and in 1984 a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison. To date, he has authored or coauthored seven books (six published and one forthcoming) and nearly 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Gene Sharp (born January 21, 1928) is a Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle, which have influenced numerous anti-government resistance movements around the world.

Sharp has been a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth since 1972. He simultaneously held research appointments at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs since 1965. In 1983 he founded the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization devoted to studies and promotion of the use of nonviolent action in conflicts worldwide. In 2009 and 2012 he was nominated for the Nobel peace prize. In 2011 he was awarded the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize.

James H. Fowler (born February 18, 1970) is an American social scientist specializing in social networks, cooperation, political participation, and genopolitics (the study of the genetic basis of political behavior). He is currently Professor of Medical Genetics in the School of Medicine and Professor of Political Science in the Division of Social Science at the University of California, San Diego. Fowler earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1992, a master's degree in International Relations from Yale University in 1997, and a Ph.D. in Government from the Harvard University in 2003. He was also a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador from 1992 to 1994. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.

James Q. Wilson was an American academic, political scientist, and an authority on public administration. A Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University and a senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, he was a co-author of the 1982 article introducing the broken windows theory. He completed an M.A. (1957) and a Ph.D. (1959) in political science at the University of Chicago. From 1961 to 1987, he was the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University.

P. Merle Black, born in 1942, is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is a frequent media source on Southern politics, as is his twin brother, Earl Black, a professor at Rice University. The two brothers are sometime co-authors, and have written several important books about politics in the Southern US, including Politics and Society in the South. Black was President of the Southern Political Science Association, 2002-2003. Black has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Paul Wolfowitz is a former United States Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank, and former dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships, and chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

From 1970 to 1972, Wolfowitz taught in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where one of his students was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. In 1972, Wolfowitz earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, writing his doctoral dissertation on "nuclear proliferation in the Middle East".

Robert D. Putnam or Robert David Putnam is a political scientist and professor of public policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is also visiting professor and director of the Manchester Graduate Summer Programme in Social Change, University of Manchester (UK). Putnam developed the influential two-level game theory that assumes international agreements will only be successfully brokered if they also result in domestic benefits. His most famous (and controversial) work, Bowling Alone, argues that the United States has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life (social capital) since the 1960s, with serious negative consequences. He was the President of the American Political Science Association (2001–2002).

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