How many Pol sciences courses required to get in Pol science PhD program?

[Bayern]

Is there any rough number of political sciences courses, which can show my adeptness on political science? What are the usual admission criteria for the top programs?

[strategery]

This all depends on what subfield you are interested in. If you are a quant jock, and have a great math/econ background, then taking a couple of poli sci classes will be enough. The main thing is to get a good letter from faculty in poli sci, which is harder to do if you don't have many classes in that department. The main admissions criteria into the elite programs are LORs, SOP, GRE (quant > AW>>>>>Verbal), GPA (profs often care about the rigor of courses rather than just high GPA), and the writing sample. Doing well on the GRE will not get you into a program, but doing poorly on it will keep you from getting in.

[Bayern]

Wont letters from profs in econ or math department do the work? I can only get one letter from the political science department.

[strategery]

Your main task will be to weave a credible story about why you want to become an expert in political science. This may be hard to do with just one letter. If your one recommender is good and vouches that this is the case, and you come up with a convincing SOP for why you want to study political science now instead of just math or econ, then you will be ok. One problem many students have when applying is that they have no idea what real political science is (i.e. they say in their SOP the reason they want to go study poli sci is because they always liked watching politics on the news). You need to make sure to get across to the ad com that this is not the case for you, even though you've taken very limited coursework. Finally, just FYI, I know for a fact my economics LOR had very little to do with my admission to political science programs, even though this letter would have carried a good deal of weight in econ admissions. My poli sci ones on the other hand were EXTREMELY integral in this respect. I therefore suspect that your math or econ LORs most likely won't have too much pull in getting into any given poli sci program. Afterall, 99% of the applicants are going to have a recommender that says X student is great for Y program - the difference boils down to whether the ad comm knows the recommender personally, or at the very least, their published work.