Penelope Higgins

As far as I know, Gray has left Penn for LSE.

Yes.

I believe that Emory traditionally flies people in for interviews.

Princeton announces searches in every subfield every year. Does not mean they will hire in all of them.

Look, I've got no dog in this fight. NYU may indeed be the best option on the list. I don't know. But the earlier post saying that because NYU is a top-15 department it is the best option was, I believe, misleading because of the separation between the MA and the PhD program. I've found that when I see applications to my PhD program from students coming out of the NYU MA program, they don't in general seem to have letters from people I would like to see or the training I would expect from the NYU political science department, and I want to make sure that the person making this decision has that information up front, since I know people who have gone there for that purpose and have been disappointed. The list of classes you posted suggested that some of this may have changed in the last couple of years. That's great. On the other hand, here is the list of PhD courses for the same semester: http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/phd.scheduleSpring2015and so the person who started this thread and anyone else interested can see the full picture for themselves.

The MA in Political Science at NYU is not a good place to get academic training. I can't compare it to the other options, which I don't know as well, but at NYU (as discussed on here before) the MA is a separate program from the PhD. Students do not normally take classes with the main political science faculty or with PhD students, and it does not prepare you well for PhD programs. Again, I can't offer advice as to how to choose among these options, but the NYU program is not as good a pre-PhD option as the name of the school would suggest. Here is a post from last year that discusses the NYU MA program in some detail:

My advice here, and in general for situations in which the candidate needs to explain a serious problem with their file, is to consider letting a letter writer do so. This requires finding a letter writer you trust, confiding in them about the situation, and explicitly asking them to address it. They will know how to contextualize the situation, and it sounds less like an excuse or justification coming from them than it does coming from the applicant.

Yeah, fair enough. I was responding less to the original post and more to the general tone of this and other threads, which seem to me to be over-emphasizing math courses as the core preparation for PhD admission. Failing a course is not going to look good on your file. But I'm not sure that the specific course (basic or upper level) or what subject area makes a difference in how it will be seen. The problem here is a failed course, not a failed math course.

Folks, I sit on an admissions committee at my university most years. I have had students admitted to top 5 departments in empirical political science in the last 5 years who had little to no math background since high school, no programming skills, and certainly little beyond intro calculus. So I just want to point out that there's a bit of exaggeration about the math background needed going on in this conversation. Applicants should simply seek to show that they are smart and able to build the needed skills once admitted.

I've posted this on here before, but it is only one data point. My department's admissions spreadsheet doesn't even have a column for the writing score from the GRE. Everyone knows it is a ridiculous test, and nobody takes it seriously.

I've sat on the admissions committee about every other year for a while now at two departments that sit in different places on the academic food chain. I can guarantee you that It makes NO difference at all when you apply as long as your application is in before the deadline, and your letters of recommendation arrive within a week or two after the deadline. The committee does not even see the files for a couple of weeks after the deadline since an administrator has to organize them and upload them to the server we use to view them. The only exception is one that arises at departments that do not fund all students. These are mostly lower-ranked departments but include many of the schools under discussion by various applicants here. At these schools, departments can nominate their best applicants (or more accurately the best applicants they think are likely to attend, since the funding rolls down to a university-wide waiting list rather than to the next nominee of that department) for university funding, and deadlines for department nominations often fall earlier than the department deadline for applicants to turn in their materials. These deadlines are usually listed on department websites with language like "for best consideration for funding, apply by X date." But with that exception aside, you should not be concerned about getting your materials in early. Simply meet the deadlines and your file will get full consideration. Note that the same thing is NOT true when you apply for academic jobs, but that is a completely separate discussion.

One name comes to mind off the top of my head: Jeff Colgan, who I think is moving to Brown. He got his PHD only a couple of years ago, so rather than planning to work with him, you might look at where he studied and who he studied with.

You can find a lot of the info you seek on department websites. I suggest you do some research of your own.

This is not my field, but my sense is that some departments that are strong in the intelligence area include Harvard (Rosen), Penn (Horowitz), and Princeton (Shapiro and Yerhi-Milho).

For analytic style work in political theory of the kind you seem to describe, Princeton and Oxford are the strongest departments. Other good places in the US besides some of the places you mention include Harvard, NYU and Brown. I don't see Chicago or Columbia as being places to do this sort of work. Outside the US, the LSE has a strong group. And more generally, most departments in England except Cambridge do analytic work in political theory. In Canada, Magill might also be a very good option; perhaps better for the style of work you're interested in than the other Canadian options you list.