Fonds 2009 - Neil Nevitte fonds

Dr. Neil H. Nevitte (b. November 10, 1948) is a Canadian political scientist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. His major areas of focus are public opinion, political participation, and electoral behaviour. Nevitte is known for his work on the World Values Survey and developing the Quick Count method for detecting election fraud.

Education and Family
Nevitte was born on November 10, 1948. He has two children, Lee and Alex, with his former wife Susan Bloch-Nevitte. Nevitte attended McMaster University where he graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. (Hons.) in 1972, followed by an M.A. in 1973. He then attended Duke University where he achieved his Ph.D. in Political Science (1978) for his dissertation Religion and the ‘New Nationalisms’: The Case of Quebec.

Academic Career and the University of Toronto
Between the 1979 and the early 1990s, Nevitte held academic teaching positions at institutions internationally. He began his postgraduate academic career as a Research Fellow and lecturer at Harvard University (1978 – 1980) where he was hand-picked by sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset to help develop initiatives on comparative survey research. During this time, he lectured at Harvard’s Department of Government (1978 – 1979) and Kennedy School Institute of Politics (1979). Nevitte subsequently held positions at Memorial University in Newfoundland as an Assistant Professor (1979 – 1980); the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor (1980 – 1982), Associate Professor (1982 – 1987), Professor (1990 – 1995), and the Director of the Research Unit for Public Policy Studies (1989 – 1990); and the University of Windsor as a Professor (1988 – 1989). Between 1985 – 1986, Nevitte also spent some time as a visiting professor and researcher in France at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne) and in the United Kingdom at the University of Leeds, University College Cardiff, and the ESRC Data Archive (University of Essex).

In 1995, Nevitte accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science where he was later cross appointed as a Professor at the School of Public Policy and Governance in 2007 and the Munk School of Global Affairs in 2010. During his time at U of T, Nevitte taught several courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels on topics such as research design, public opinion and values, and electoral behaviour. He also served on the Department of Political Science’s Promotions and Tenure Committee (2004, 2008) and the University’s Connaught Fellow Review Committee (2007 – 2009). Nevitte retired to Professor Emeritus in 2020.

Technical Advising
Between 1992 and 2020, Nevitte worked as a technical advisor to the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and similar domestic and international NGOs. He primarily provided consultations on the prevention and detection of election fraud as well as the conditions for fair and free elections. He worked on several voter registry audits, election supervision, and democracy survey projects in over 25 countries. During this time, Nevitte developed the Quick Count methodology to quickly and reliably detect election fraud. The method is described in his coauthored handbook: Quick Count and Election Observation: An NDI Handbook for Civic Organizations and Political Parties (2002) and has since become an international standard for assessing the legitimacy of elections.

Research and Publications
Throughout his career, Nevitte has participated in several major research endeavors at the international, national, and local levels. Most notably, Nevitte has served as the Principal Investigator for the Canadian segment of the World Values Survey (WVS), the largest non-commercial cross-national, cross-time social survey program in the world. He has also served as a co-investigator for several Canadian-specific projects including the Canadian Referendum Study (1992), the Canadian Elections Study (CES) (1993 – 2011), and Political Ethics in Canada (1993 – 2020). From 1998 – 2001, Nevitte partnered with Seymour Martin Lipset (Harvard University) and Stanley Rothman (Smith College) to conduct the Cross-National Universities Study which examined how students, faculty, and administrators viewed policies and practices across universities in Canada and the United States. Additionally, around 1999, Nevitte was selected to lead one of eight teams of academics for the Policy Research Initiative’s Project on Trends (also known as the Trends Project); his team was responsible for reviewing and synthesizing the current literature on value change in Canada.[1]

Nevitte has written and contributed to over 100 papers, chapters, books related to his research. He has published several books which primarily focus on the findings of the WVS, CES, and Political Ethics projects including Convergencia en Norte America (1994), The Challenge of Direct Democracy (1996), The North American Trajectory (1996), The Decline of Deference (1996), A Question of Ethics (1998), Unsteady State (2000), Anatomy of a Liberal Victory (2002), The Democratic Audit of Canada (2004), and Dominance and Decline (2011). He has also edited 6 other books including The Future of North America (1985); Ethnic Preference and Public Policy in Developing States (1986); Introductory Readings in Government and Politics (1995); Political Value Change in Western Democracies (1997); and Value Change and Governance in Canada (2002). Many of his other works appear in several high-impact political science journals such as Political Communication, European Journal of Political Research, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Political Psychology.

Professional Activities
Outside his academic career, Nevitte was involved in several professional activities. He has held positions on advisory boards for the WVS (since 1995), Centre on Democratic Performance at Binghamton University (since 2000), and Vote Compass Canada (since 2010); editorial boards for the Journal on Race, Ethnicity and Government Policy (1989 – 1992), Este Pais (since 1991), and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (since 1999); on the CPSA Board of Directors (1997 – 1990); and as the Chair of the WVS Strategic Planning Committee (since 1999). He has also served as a referee more than 10 academic journals including the Canadian Journal of Political Science and International Organization. Additionally, Nevitte has provided expert testimony for several Canadian court cases about topics such as survey methods, federal election financing, and methods for detecting election fraud.

Honors and Awards
Nevitte has been recognized for his work with numerous research grants, fellowships, and awards. For his publications and conference papers, he was awarded the Ithiel de Sola Pool Award for the Best Paper on Political Communication presented at the APSA Annual Meetings (1994); APSA for Best Paper on Public Opinion and Voting Presented at the 1996 APSA Annual Meeting (1997), and the CPSA John McMenemy Award for the Best Article(2001). He was the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship (1997 – 1998), a Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences (2003 – 2004), and numerous research grants 1985 and 2009. Nevitte was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008, and in 2018 he was awarded the Ludwick and Estell Jus Memorial Human Rights Prize from the University of Toronto for his work on the detection of elections fraud and ensuring conditions for free and fair elections around the world.

For additional biographical information see Professor Nevitte’s CV and biography in Series 1, file B2021-0011/001(02).