Research in academic university rankings mainly focuses on the methodological improvements in ranking or concern the practice, not the principle. There is a tendency in the core literature of rankings that they are ontologically accepted as reality-reflecting phenomena. However, this research tries a political analysis of ranking systems as hegemonic governing apparatus within the Gramscian Theory of Hegemony framework. For this purpose, we analyzed the top 100 lists of global university rankings and indices used in the rankings as research indicator sources. Even if this research is designed as political analysis, we integrated statistical findings to reveal the hegemonic oligarchs in rankings. The results show that there is a dominance of the USA and major Western European countries in ranking results and indices in terms of possession of journals. Moreover, correlation analysis gives evidence that different ranking system results reproduce a pre-given hierarchy. Drawing on Gramsci, the article resists the view of rankings as apolitical, subjective performance criteria of educational value, instead makes the rankings open to discussion in the realm of contestable politics as valuation and hierarchization tools of academic capitalist and neoliberalist forces to shape higher education globally within the frames of the best model, defined by global elites.

学术型大学排名研究主要关注排名方法的改进或关注实践，而非原则。排名的核心文献中有一种趋势，即它们在本体论上被接受为反映现实的现象。然而，本研究尝试在葛兰西霸权理论框架内对作为霸权管理机构的等级系统进行政治分析。为此，我们分析了全球大学排名前 100 名列表和排名中使用的指数作为研究指标来源。即使这项研究被设计为政治分析，我们也整合了统计结果来揭示排名中的霸权寡头。结果表明，在期刊拥有量排名结果和指数方面，美国和主要西欧国家占据主导地位。此外，相关性分析提供的证据表明，不同的排名系统结果再现了预先给定的层次结构。文章借鉴葛兰西，反对将排名视为教育价值的非政治性、主观表现标准的观点，而是将排名作为学术资本主义和新自由主义力量在全球范围内塑造高等教育的估值和等级化工具，在可竞争的政治领域进行讨论在由全球精英定义的最佳模型的框架内。