11 Facts About Rein Taagepera

Rein Taagepera was born on 28 February 1933 and is an Estonian political scientist and former politician.

Rein Taagepera graduated from high school in Marrakech, Morocco, and then studied physics in Canada and the United States.

Rein Taagepera served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies from 1986 until 1988.

Later Rein Taagepera admitted that one of the reasons why he ran, despite having little chance to win, was to take away votes from Ruutel and thus help Meri rise to the presidency.

In 2003, Rein Taagepera agreed to serve for half a year as the founding chairman of a new political party, Res Publica, which won the general elections that year and lead the governing coalition under Prime Minister Juhan Parts until April 2005.

Rein Taagepera tried to hold the party more or less in the middle of the spectrum.

In 2005, Rein Taagepera resigned his Res Publica membership, frustrated with the party's leadership style and move to the right.

Rein Taagepera is the creator, together with Markku Laakso, of the Laakso-Taagepera index which estimates the "Effective number of parties".

Rein Taagepera later systematized numerous contributions in electoral systems theory into a general, quantitative theoretical framework, exposed in the volume Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems.

Apart from the quantitative study of electoral and party systems, Rein Taagepera has published several studies of Estonian and Baltic history, politics, and culture.

Rein Taagepera received the American Political Science Association's Hallett and Longley Awards as well as the Estonian National Science Prize, Social Science Category, the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, and the Karl Deutsch Award.