Academic Experts' Biographies

Academic Experts’ Biographies

www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca

Ken Carty is Professor and sometime Head of the Department of Political Science in The University of British Columbia where he currently holds the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies. A Past President of the Canadian Political Science Association, he was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies in 2005. For over a decade he has chaired UBC Press.

Carty has served as a consultant to both national and provincial Royal Commissions of Inquiry, the CBC Ombudsman, and the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada. He was appointed by the Speaker of the House of Commons to be a member of the last federal Electoral Boundaries Commission for British Columbia. During 2003-04 served as the Director of Research for the BC Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. Active in the community, he is Chair of the Board of Governors of the Vancouver School of Theology.

Carty’s scholarship has been primarily concerned with political parties and electoral systems. He has published widely on politics in Europe, Canada and Australia. His most recent book (co-authored with Munroe Eagles, a political geographer) is Politics is Local: National Politics at the Grassroots.

Bill Cross is associate professor of political science at Carleton University. He is a student of Canadian and comparative political parties and election campaigns. He joined Carleton after 8 years at Mount Allison University. Prior to that he was an SSHRC post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.

Cross’s current research focuses on party candidate and leadership selection, youth participation in political parties and electoral system reform in Canada. His work has appeared in many academic journals. His most recent book is Political Parties, part of the Canadian Democratic Audit series. From 2003-2005 he served as Director of Research for the New Brunswick Commission on Legislative Democracy.

Professor Cross holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario, a Masters degree from the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, a JD from the University of Houston Law School and a BA from the University of Waterloo.

David Farrell graduated from the National University of Ireland, and was awarded his M.A., NUI and Ph.D. from the European University Institute. David is a member of the Advisory Board of the CSA Political Science and Government Abstracts, San Diego, as well as a member of the Advisory Council of the F. Clinton White Resource Center at the International Foundation for Election Systems in Washington, DC. He is also an academic advisor to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, Washington DC.

Professor Farrell’s research is focused primarily on party politics and also on electoral systems and their consequences, which most recently included an internet survey of MEPs in the current European Parliament to examine the effects of electoral institutions on their representative roles. The results of that research will appear in David Farrell and Roger Scully, Representing Europe’s Citizens?.

He has published widely on election processes and systems and democracy, and is the author of Electoral Systems: A Comparative Introduction. He edits two key journals in this field, Party Politics and Representation, and is a member of the editorial boards of International Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Marketing, and Irish Political Studies.

Louis Massicotte is Visiting Professor in Democracy and Elections at American University, Washington DC, on leave from the Department of Political Science, Université de Montreal. He has written extensively about electoral systems, and is currently working on a book on MMP systems. In recent years, he acted as technical advisor to the Quebec Minister for Electoral Reform. He co-authored Establishing the Rules of the Game. Election Laws in Democracies.

Elizabeth McLeay teaches comparative politics in the Political Science and International Relations Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She has published on the New Zealand cabinet and Parliament, electoral system reform, political representation (especially of women and Maori), and comparative public policy. She has also edited and co- edited books on New Zealand politics, including analyses of general elections. In early 2004 Elizabeth spoke at the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform; and in 2001 she was Fulbright Visiting Professor in New Zealand Studies, Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Elizabeth convenes the New Zealand Chapter of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group, established the New Zealand Politics Research Group, and is a former Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences Faculty.

Sarah Birch is a Reader in Politics at the University of Essex where she has taught since 1996. Her research interests include electoral systems and electoral conduct in democratizing countries, with special emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe. Her most recent books are the co-authored volume Embodying Democracy: Electoral System Design in Post-Communist Europe, which examines the factors that influenced the choice of electoral system in eight post-communist states, and Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post- Communist Europe, which considers the effects of electoral systems on political outcomes in 22 Central and Eastern European states. She is currently working on a book on electoral integrity and malpractice in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as a study of compulsory voting.

Sarah is also director of the Democratic Development Unit at the University of Essex and co- editor of the British Journal of Political Science. She has undertaken election-related projects for a variety of governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations, including USAID, International IDEA, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the UK Electoral Commission, and the UK-based Association of Electoral Administrators.

André Blais is professor in the Department of Political Science and research fellow with the Centre de recherche et de développement en économique at the Université de Montréal. His research interests include elections and voting behaviour, electoral rules, polls and public opinion, and methodology. He has been a co-investigator on the Canadian Election Studies since 1988. His most recent book is To Vote or Not to Vote? The Merits and Limits of Rational Choice Theory. He has published eleven other books and more than one hundred articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, the Revue française de science politique, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. He has recently been awarded a Canada Research Chair in Electoral Studies.