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Well the reason is they actually don't have much money to use. There's just some context here on UK education and Oxford in particular. Sorry if you know this already and it's unhelpful, but hopefully provides a bit of background. For the UK, undergrad student fees only started in 2012 and are capped at £9000 for UK/EU students, but the average Oxford undergrad costs far more than that to educate. The Colleges cover this cost from their endowment dividends, but it leaves very little money for graduate funding. At the same time, government funding has fallen faster than tuition rates have risen because of how unpopular tuition fees are, so all universities are facing funding shortfalls, but Oxford faces particular issues with undergrad costs. Equally, the colleges, central university and department are all separate legal entities so maintain separate funding, so college funding is not controlled by the departments or the university. The departments also have essentially no access to wealthy alumni because the colleges maintain priority and can deny the departments' requests to contact alumni for donations. (This is why the Blavatnik School of Public Policy and Said Business School are named after shady figured with no affiliation to Oxford).  The colleges also get far more money than the departments, meaning you have a lot of resource-poor departments and resource-rich colleges. There is also wide variation: Magdalen, St. John's, Christ Church, Worcester are loaded, but St Peter's and Mansfield are out of money.
So, there's little money for graduate funding. They prioritize DPhil funding in most departments, but they're very reliant on outside funding (ESRC, AHRC, Rhodes, Marshall, various country-specific funding) for lots of grad students. Clarendon is their initiative to try to overcome some of these issues, but that only funds 140 people a year across the whole university. Lots of the natural and hard sciences get Wellcome Trust funding, so the funding issue is particularly acute in Humanities and Social Sciences. 
As a result, in the context of the MPhil Comparative Government, they'll admit ~30 people for an expected intake of ~14. I would bet fewer than 7 of those end up with some amount of funding. Pretty much a max of 1 will have a Clarendon, 1-2 might have ESRC, maybe 1-2 Rhodes, 2-3 random college scholarships. In some years they'll have zero ESRC and zero Clarendons. The remaining students will be some combination of native-country-government funding and self-funding. They're aware their degrees become havens for the rich, but they don't have much recourse. The humanities and area studies masters are particularly bad for this: basically everyone I ever met doing the MPhil in Middle East Studies was super posh.
Anyway, hope that answers the question. They really aren't nefarious about it, but they basically have a massively inefficient system that means they'll never be able to compete funding-wise with American universities. The bad part is that it's an open secret among Oxford students, so we at least make an educated decision about applying knowing funding is unlikely, while they really aren't up-front enough with outside applicants that the chances of getting funding are very low.

Oh ya, I don't mean it's cause you've been denied from ESRC at all! Just that Nuffield takes very few non-ESRC, non-Clarendon students at the masters level, so if you're successful with ESRC, you might still end up there.  Though, you could just get randomly allocated to some other college. I think Nuffield just turns almost every masters student down at the start, then when the list of people with scholarships is decided they'll take a few of them.

If anyone's still wondering where your Harvard rejection letter is, it's in your "promotions" folder if you use Gmail. Pretty shitty promotion tbh. 

Sorry to say the thinking seems to be both have sent out all acceptances. Poor form from both to keep people waiting on official news, particularly as Chicago released acceptances a month ago.

ya that is tough. I have a paranoid fear that snubbing departments is a bad look and the academic world (particularly within a subdiscipline) is so tiny that it's the wrong way to start, but you might just reach out to your preferred school and say you've already RSVP'd to another visit weekend, is there anyway you could come another time to meet with professors and get a lay of the land there? I think most would be happy to do that, particularly if it's just you meeting with a few professors and grad students.

Since it's a telemarketer and they're now officially trolling you I think it's only fair that you should start ringing them up all hours of the day and try to sell them on your prospective dissertation. Gotta fund grad school somehow.

Just got the call from Cambridge. In at Harvard. Good luck to everybody! I'm done for the cycle!!!!!!

I think you're on the wrong thread, Placebo. Good luck anyways.

Columbia and Yale are pretty unpredictable. I'd bet we hear in the next week but they both have a tendency to report late and unpredictably.
As far as their masters programs holding up decisions, I kinda doubt it. Columbia typically accepts, waitlists, rejects outright or tells people they've been rejected from the PhD but are being considered for the MA. A few people have previously reported that their rejection came with an MA acceptance, but it seems much more common to be told you're just being considered with the general MA applicants. I haven't seen Yale put people up for a masters, but to be fair, their application portal says PhD/Master's application, so maybe that's part of the delay.
I just think they're taking their time. Only strange thing will be campus visit days. I'd imagine they'll be in late March, but that's not very long to make arrangements, so it's a bit weird.

I just want to be finished so I don't have that weird lingering anxiety to check my email. I've developed a bizarre muscle memory of checking the results page and my email every time I open my computer. It's weirdly more annoying because I'm almost certain I won't get into either of my remaining two, but am still anxious about them.

Agreed—I’m sure my compulsive email refreshment anxiety is not healthy. 

Who else is sitting around wondering what's going on at Yale and Columbia?

That's about the same average rent in Hyde Park, with an approximate +/- $200 depending on how nice a place you want. 
Austin Carson is no slouch either.

Hi! Also looking at these programs. One thing to consider on UCSD is graduate student housing is much cheaper than private renting, so you can get a studio for less than $800/month and share a 2BR for as little as $600. That significantly decreases the cost of living. Another thing that stands out to me is that lots of their strength in placement, at least for my specific research area, comes at least partially from methods research. Lots of their top placements over the last few years have been people doing cutting edge work on things like network theory who then publish with Fowler and others in Science/Nature on more general methodological questions. That's obviously really good for training and placement, but if that's not your cup of tea, it might be worth thinking about and focusing on the placement who aren't doing that kind of work. This is just an observation from my research area, too, so might not apply to yours!
Chicago lost some senior folks and continued hiring lots of theorists, to the detriment of some other areas. My feeling on it is that the junior people they've hired have been exceptional, so the program is seen as on a strong upswing. Staniland and Albertus come to mind. USNWR is pretty weird because their rankings are entirely based on peer evaluations, which of course have all kinds of strange biases, time lags, etc. I'm also cognizant that recent placements in my research area weren't advised by the people who would be advising me, so might not be entirely reflective of the training/placement assistance I would get there. My POI also told me they're in the process of hiring two senior methodologists after Patty/Penn left for Emory. The methods training seems to be the weakest link in the program so two strong hires in that area would help with training.
Only other note I'll make is the difference in systems. UChicago tends to have longer PhDs (6-7 years) then a post-doc, while UCSD tends to get people out in at most 6 years and straight into TT jobs. UCSD also has much higher teaching loads from the first day, but the alumni I've talked to have said it's pretty manageable. 

Don't stress out about it. If you don't have any immediate questions, say something along the lines of "Thank you so much for the kind email. I too am excited about the prospects of working together. I look forward to speaking more at the admitted students weekend."

That should do it. If you're certain this is where you are attending, feel free to start discussing more about getting ready for next year -- you could ask for summer reading recommendations, etc. If you haven't made a decision, just be polite, kind, and demonstrate your eagerness and excitement over being accepted without overplaying your position.

I'd definitely not ignore emails. It's unprofessional. Obviously, it happens and most people probably wouldn't notice, but sending a short reply within roughly 24 hours is what's expected. The emails usually contain a congratulations and a message welcoming you to the department. You can reply with your thanks to their message, your positive feelings about being accepted, and your interest in learning more about the program through communications from the department in the coming weeks, even if you don't have specific questions at the moment.

Paul Staniland and Ben Lessing are excellent

Ya Kaylvas leaving was big, but Wood is still there, and while the OCV closed because he wasn't there to run it, they've started up a consequences of political violence workshop that has essentially the same framework just without the fellowships. I also think Kalyvas is still on the grad students' committees that he was on before so hasn't abandoned anyone. But it is pretty crazy to think if you got in yale five years ago to do civil wars you probably assumed you'd won the lottery, but by the time you graduate, Sambanis, Lawrence, Kalyvas, and Lyall all left. That said, their younger hires' research is really interesting and it'll be interesting to see whether they try to replace Lyall with someone else. Yale still has crazy amounts of money and cache. Chicago has similarly acrimonious internal politics but has managed to turn around their department with an overall endowment that's about 1/4 of Yale's. I doubt they'll ever be *the* place to study civil conflict again but I won't be shocked when they're a very strong department in a few years.

As Yale is the only decision I have left that would be attractive, I'm also waiting on them, but assuming I'll be rejected and definitely end up at Chicago, barring changing my mind once I've visited places.
From talking to a couple of my professors who either went there, taught there or had friends there, Yale's a strange place. The department has bled senior academics like Kalyvas, Mantena (leaving for Columbia apparently), Thachill, and Sambanis. They've also struggled to hold onto some talented younger academics like Adria Lawrence. They just denied tenure to Jason Lyall. As I understand it, there's some bad power politics within the department that likely are a big part of why so many people have left. As such, lots of political scientists who for whatever reason care about rankings would say they've struggled to maintain their stature in recent years. I'd bet most would still say they're a strong top 10 department and better than that depending on what you're studying/who you're studying with, but I know some would say they're not a CHYMPS-caliber department right now, or at the very least, they are the weakest of those six.  If that reallllly means anything I guess is a bigger question. I'm sure someone else on here might disagree with this.
On the whole, their treatment of staff and grad students is historically less than great. The university refuses to recognize the grad student union, while morale among academics is pretty bad. The Yale Daily News just reported that the administration pushed for a report on faculty satisfaction to remain secret because it said 69% of faculty didn't think their department was top 5 and a majority thought the university mistreated staff and was failing to recruit top-level academics. Pretty hard to recruit when the stories coming out of the department are all about dysfunction. 

Michigan is a top 5 program, OSU is outside the top 10 but still a good place to end up, depending on what you want. Equally, unlike undergrad, the difference between a top 5 and a 15th ranked program is massive in terms of your chances of getting a TT job, top fellowships, external funding, etc. If you have the choice between OSU and Michigan, I would say there is essentially no reason to choose OSU. This year they claim to have admitted 4% of 400 applicants. It's known for having exceptional academics, training, and placement records. 
Funding wise, Michigan almost certainly offers more, though I'm sure there are people on this board who have been admitted to both who can tell you exactly what the difference is.
Michigan is historically a top program, part of the 'CHYMPS' acronym of top schools: Cal, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford. This is by no means a definitive or even that useful of a list of top programs -- for instance, many people see Yale as struggling after many top academics left -- but it is a good general guide to the most prestigious programs. For instance, this blog has a network map of where the top 400 cited political scientists went to grad school and the edges represent where they then went to teach: https://alexandreafonso.me/2019/02/11/academic-hierarchies-in-us-political-science/
 

Michigan is a top 5 program, OSU is outside the top 10 but still a good place to end up, depending on what you want. Equally, unlike undergrad, the difference between a top 5 and a 15th ranked program is massive in terms of your chances of getting a TT job, top fellowships, external funding, etc. If you have the choice between OSU and Michigan, I would say there is essentially no reason to choose OSU. This year they claim to have admitted 4% of 400 applicants. It's known for having exceptional academics, training, and placement records. 
Funding wise, Michigan almost certainly offers more, though I'm sure there are people on this board who have been admitted to both who can tell you exactly what the difference is.
Michigan is historically a top program, part of the 'CHYMPS' acronym of top schools: Cal, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford. This is by no means a definitive or even that useful of a list of top programs -- for instance, many people see Yale as struggling after many top academics left -- but it is a good general guide to the most prestigious programs. For instance, this blog has a network map of where the top 400 cited political scientists went to grad school and the edges represent where they then went to teach: https://alexandreafonso.me/2019/02/11/academic-hierarchies-in-us-political-science/
 

Really depends. I'm an American who went to Oxbridge and have spoken with lots of people there about this very issue as I was tempted to stay on for an MPhil. The general rule is go to a top US program or go to school where you want to work. The pipeline of US PhDs to top universities around the world is strong and a good route if you wanna teach in Europe/Asia/Latin America/MENA, but the pipelines does not exist in reverse. The US is the gold standard for training. The methods training, research experience, etc. are all far superior to almost any European program, and usually, if you want a job in US academia, you need to attend a US university. There are of course a couple instances of people coming from other places, e.g. Ragnhild Nordas at UMich, who went to European universities, but they are very rare. Half of this is snobbery: Americans don't respect European social science for several reasons, none of which are very good. Many American academics erroneously see Europe as where you get a job when you fail to get one in the US. 
Oxford is likely the most well-respected institution outside the US and it almost never places people into R1s. The DPIR there has worked very hard to hire top-quality US academics -- see Ben Ansell, Stathis Kalyvas, Jane Gingrich, Andy Eggers, Todd Hall, and quite a few others -- but even those academics' students don't place well in the US. LSE does even worse. That said, the UK is probably the most well-respected system outside the US. If you want to do political sociology, Utrecht, Amsterdam and the Nuffield crowd at Oxford are exceptional, and there are good academics at the Juan March Institute and the EUI. Sciences Po in Paris is very highly ranked internationally but only go if you want to live and teach there. Their academics write almost entirely about France and its former colonies and do so in French. All of these places could get you jobs in Europe. None should be seen as a good way to get an R1 job in the US.