Is anyone currently pursuing a political science program at Emory? Is the program reputable?
“reputable”? Most undergraduate departments/entities (especially non-STEM departments) in a college of arts and letters at almost any school (elite are non) are not super reputable for the undergraduate aspect of it. Often graduate program success and research make a program reputable. Again, certain STEM programs may be exceptionally strong to be notable from outsiders at certain schools. Exceptions with humanities and social sciences may occur with something like say, English at Emory and some other top schools and maybe PoliSci or similar programs at a place like Tufts or Georgetown. There are programs at other schools just as “good” as some of these I mention at the undergraduate level but they are not necessarily as reputable. As in, they do not stand out too much above other super strong departments at the school enough to be mentioned as a single department that attracts students. At Emory, these are undergraduate programs like anthropology, neuroscience, business, English/Creative Writing, biology, chemistry, human health, nursing, history to some extent, recently QTM has been a draw. Political Science is just a really well-run program that is indeed very popular, but that may also be because of the pre-law population at Emory. Do you mean, is it good/known to be a solid department? If so, yes. You can gauge quality by looking at the amount of affiliated internship opps, undergraduate research opps, affiliated programs (special programs) geared toward undergraduates and course offerings: http://polisci.emory.edu/home/undergraduate/index.html. Judging by the undergraduate academics page, they clearly have a lot of money and a lot of opportunities: I would say it is very strong in undergraduate education (part of this opinion comes from having taken some of the special topics and upper division courses) and is clearly a big thing at Emory but is maybe just below the tier of the the other programs I mention.
When I hear reputable, I usually think: People, pre-professional aspirations or not, come to school specifically because that major is known to be done very well at that particular school. Polisci is excellent at Emory but it is hard to parse out if people would not have majored in it if they had gone to a place where it was not done as well.