Manchild

Penelope has already suggested the names I would have mentioned. Given the way you have characterized your interests, Ober and his work sound like a fantastic fit, so it's a shame you can't/won't consider West Coast options.

Theory is not really a unified field like the others, making rankings somewhat (though perhaps not entirely) pointless. Main thing to know is not to go anywhere outside the "top-ten" or so if you want to end up with a job.

...alternatively, equilibrium approaches to the study of institutions may be the best way to explain ongoing democratic stability in developed contexts in the face of tremendous economic uncertainty...

Some of the "new wave" of cutting edge empirical research employs experimental methods (which includes "exploiting" natural experiments), political geography (GIS), and "political genetics". Not an IR scholar, but it appears as though IR Theory is becoming less and less relevant to the study of conflict, security, and international institutions.

There is literally no combination of scholars doing ethnicity, conflict, and violence stuff that are better than that trio at Stanford.

Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy by Acemoglu and Robinson

So let me get this straight, you're claiming that if (hypothetically) you wanted to become a methodologist (stats), and you only got into two schools, Harvard and Ohio State, you'd choose Ohio State? Sounds ludicrous to me, especially considering the other resources available to you at Harvard (e.g. economics department, business school and associated faculty, etc.)... The same holds for Princeton, Michigan, Stanford, et al.

You advise people to research programs and then come up with this? Princeton has one of the top methods faculties in the world, the folks at Harvard are likewise renowned. Any of the major ivy league political science programs will get you cutting edge methods training. If one has heavy quantitative leanings, the only schools that are competitive with the top Ivy League universities (taking into account faculty, overall training, and placement) are Stanford, NYU, Michigan, Rochester, Caltech, and MIT. Having to take one or two theory courses won't kill anyone (and will probably enrich their research). Choosing a lesser institution simply because they don't have a theory requirement would be ludicrous, to say the least.

Whoops, I misread your post.

"For quality of life, Cambridge wins hands down over Palo Alto, which is basically a yuppie suburb with nothing to do." A ridiculous statement. Palo Alto is pretty suburban, but there are a number of bars and great restaurants in the area, Santa Cruz, various other beaches, and San Francisco are all < 45 minutes away, you can swim in the pool 10 months of the year, and its 75 degrees there right now. Depends on what you're looking for, I guess, but I'd say NorCal quality of life is pretty good, if not close to the best in the U.S. Opinions are fine, but rhetoric like that is ridiculous.

My advice: take the US News rankings with a grain of salt. They are severely out-of-date and weren't all that good to begin with. It all depends on your interests. What kind of things interest you? A short and imperfect list of schools that belong higher (in some cases much higher) on the list but are not (due either to relatively recent hires or ridiculous oversight): Duke, Stanford, UCLA, WUSTL, Virginia - which represents a real mash of different interests. Chicago and Berkeley are probably overranked on the list and I would suggest that Yale probably was too (though by less) until the recent addition of Pogge. Other interesting programs outside the U.S. include University of Toronto, McGill, and Oxford (obviously), though degrees from these places may make it harder to get placement in the U.S. Anyways, it depends massively on your interests, and it's hard to think of theory as a unified field that is "rankable" anyways, so. Nonetheless, if you're willing to share them, I could help a lot more.

Placement stats of the programs? I suspect that B's might be significantly better than C's... If that's the case, I'd work really hard to find out who would be helpful at B. You might be surprised.

Stanford is tops in African (and by quite a bit, I think).

I think it all boils down to your specific program. From what I understand, e.g. for Econ, UBC or Univ. of Toronto might be better than mediocre U.S. schools. Likewise for Pol. Science, definitely Toronto (especially theory) and possibly McGill are worth attending over mediocre U.S. programs.

Define "rigor". Political science that is not rigorous is simply bad political science, whether its theory, comparative, IR, or policy.