I visited Rochester and Ohio State in the past week and I want to study formal, methods, and American so take this with a grain of salt.
Rochester: They really have a close knit group of people. The professors and grad students all seem to get along. The grad students all take the formal and methods sequence so the students at Rochester are generally great at math. This can be a great thing. The classes are notoriously hard and a professor of mine from the econ department at Rochester considers the program the hardest political science program in the world. Having students who can work together and aid each other through that kind of hell can be a huge asset. Also, the program kind of goes all-out when it comes to recruitment.
Ohio State: As someone else posted, the department is great - in IR. However, they are really suffering in American and Methods. They lost Luke Keele, Craig Volden, and Alan Weisman in the last year. They are hedging all bets on their incoming hires: a guy from Stanford GSB and one from UCSD. Their formal sequence is nearly non-existent. When it comes to their formal sequence, there are maybe two students. William Minozzi is a great guy and I think he will change how we look at formal theory in political science, Jan Box-Steffensmeier is great and is renowned in her studies in time series analysis, the department wants to hire more networks people in the future but the program is really in a rebuilding stage.
