Douglas W. Rae
American political scientist
Douglas Whiting Rae (born 1939) is an American political scientist. He is the Richard Ely Professor of Political Science and Management at Yale University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as Chief Administrative Officer of the City of New Haven, Connecticut in 1990–1991. He has contributed to the BBC, The New Republic, and The New York Times.
Education
He is a graduate of Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his Ph.D. adviser was Austin Ranney.
Research
Perhaps his most seminal work, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws (1967, 2nd ed. 1971), was the first systematic comparative analysis of electoral systems, applying the mathematical tools of social science to past elections in the Western industrialized world to determine the effects of electoral laws on election results, in particular on proportionality i.e. the correspondences between parties' vote shares and seat shares, and the number of parties in a given country. While the book has become dated by the explosion in electoral studies that occurred across the world more than a decade later, much of his terminology and guiding criteria e.g. his three basic dimensions of electoral systems (1) electoral formula (the mathematical method for translating votes into seats), (2) district magnitude (the number of members to be elected in a district), and (3) ballot structure (the way in which electoral choices are presented on the ballot), remain standard.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5302072. VIAF identifies the subject as 48029517. The Library of Congress control number is n79004039. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1990, 1991 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Douglas W. Rae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.