Richard Johnston
Richard Johnston is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation from 2011 to 2020. At UBC, he is also affiliated with the Centre for Migration Studies.
His research and writing falls into three major areas: electoral systems, party systems, and parties; communications media and campaigns; and social capital, diversity and the welfare state. His interest in election systems and parties spans his career and includes close investigation of patterns in Canada especially, but also the United States. His books in this area include The Canadian Party System: An Analytic History and The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (with Byron E. Shafer). His work on communications and campaigns includes national-scale fieldwork that led to the book Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (with André Blais, Henry E. Brady, and Jean Crête) and The Challenge of Direct Democracy: the 1992 Canadian Referendum (with Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, and Neil Nevitte). His research in Canada led to his move to the University of Pennsylvania, where he launched the National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), which was fielded in 2000, 2004, and 2008 and led to The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics (with Michael G. Hagen and Kathleen Hall Jamieson). Johnston has also incorporated the foundations of his Canadian work in election studies in Austria, Italy, New Zealand, and the UK.
In addition to his years on the UBC faculty, Johnston has taught at the University of Toronto, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has held visiting fellowships at Queen’s University at Kingston, the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), and the Australian National University.