He took his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins University in comparative literature in 1953 and was a graduate student at the London School of Economics from 1953 to 1954.

[13] He pursued studies at Oxford, graduating with a DPhil from Nuffield College with a thesis, titled "The Relation of Socialist Principles to British Labour Foreign Policy 1945-51.

[4] In his public affairs work, Rose has provided consultations for British parliamentary committees,[19] the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, OECD, the World Bank, and UN agencies.

[22] Since 1998, he has volunteered as a consultant for Transparency International's Global Barometer Surveys on corruption[23] and has written a monthly online commentary discussing the electoral implications of public opinion polls since 2023.

Adding to his body of work in this field, his book titled, How Referendums Challenge European Democracy: Brexit and Beyond was published in 2020.

[33] He also authored Welfare Goes Global: Making Progress and Catching Up (2024) which compares health, education and female employment of people living in countries with 95 percent of the world's population.

[34] In recognition of his contributions to comparative public policy, a 14-chapter volume titled The Problem of Governing: Essays for Richard Rose has been published.

[35] Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rose created a series of New Democracy Barometer sample surveys to collect evidence about the political, economic and social transformation of post-Communist societies.

[39] Rose has given a personal account of fieldwork across continents in a memoir titled Learning about Politics in Time and Space,[40] including a chapter entitled "Reflections of a Comparative Social Scientist.