whattheydo

You could look into Washington-Seattle. There seems to be some flux in the department there (maybe because of funding issues?) but I'm told that comparative and PE are relative strengths of the department. Some younger faculty (Menaldo, Adolph) working in those areas, and Ahlquist, of FSU and now Wisconsin, was a good placement in recent years (though evidently a couple members of his committee have since moved on...).

This is a good instinct. While Chicago has plenty of methodologically sophisticated faculty at home in the political science department (a fact overlooked on this board, perhaps because the same facutly are not IR scholars), including Betsy Sinclair of Caltech (who's publishing with Don Green) and Jong Hee Park of WashU (who teaches the Maximum Likelihood course), the Harris School -- quite naturally because of its technical orientation -- is also a great resource for training in quant methods. To this point, Chicago's workshop in political economy is hosted out of the Harris School. That workshop goes out of its way to focus on developing scholarship that utilizes (maybe even over-utilizes) quantitative research designs, including both applied statistics and formal theory. And on the subject of workshops, Chicago's system is second to none (there are literally dozens of well-subsidized workshops that convene on a weekly basis) and they're an incredible resource. The various political science workshops -- Program in International Political Economy and Security (PIPES) (distinct from the straightforward PE workshop mentioned above), Program in International Security Policy (PISP), Comparative Politics, Political Theory, etc., etc., -- host scholars at the top of the field while also giving Chicago grad students an opportunity to present their work and receive (at times whithering) feedback. In fact, I'd say it's only by attending one of these workshops that you can truly appreciate how rigorous the Chicago approach to political science is. That rigor (after controlling for the generous budgets, which allow the department to fly scholars in from the east and west coast) is probably why scholars make a point of presenting at Chicago. Off the top of my head I can say that scholars like Keohane, Fearon, Glaser and Buthe all presented in 2011, and that's focusing only on the IR subfield.