Harris spent his childhood in Auckland and received his secondary education at Street Peter"s College. He graduated Bachelor(Honours) at Victoria University of Wellington in 1971 and Doctor of Philosophy at the Australian National University in 1981.
Harris was Chief Executive of the New Zealand Electoral Commission from 1994 until 2003. In 2007 he headed an independent working group on Fiji"s elections, under the auspices of the Fiji interim Government and the Pacific Islands Forum, in the wake of the 2006 Fijian coup d"état. He has also been Country Director for Yemen at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and served twice as an official New Zealand election observer in Indonesia.
Before serving on the electoral commission, he was a Lecturer at the Canberra College of Advanced (1975-1979), Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics, Victoria University of Wellington (1979-1994) and Principal Research officer, Royal Commission on the Electoral System (1985-1986).
In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2005 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006 he was made a member of the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007 he was granted an honorary Doctorate from the University de Rennes. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. In 2014 he was awarded the American Psychological Association Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in developmental psychology.
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. British Academy.
