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

in international relations in 1969 and moved to academia as a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, where he stayed for his entire American career.

In 2005, Taagepera resigned his Res Publica membership, frustrated with the party's leadership style and move to the right (refer to his essay, Meteoric trajectory).

Taagepera's theoretical scholarly work, which mainly deals with electoral systems, is heavily quantitative and modelling in character and strongly informed by the epistemology of his previous field, physics.

Taagepera's original epistemological and methodological approach, defined as logical quantitative modeling, is systematically presented in the recent volume Making Social Sciences More Scientific.