Abby Blass is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research areas are public law and American and comparative politics. Her substantive interests include comparative judicial politics and behavior, constitutional design and constitutional law, and institutional design generally. Abby earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Michigan in 2004.
Abby will spend academic year 2011-2012 in France as a visiting researcher at the Center for European Studies at Sciences Po Paris (Centre d'Etudes Européan, L'Institut d'études politiques). Her dissertation includes a comparison of the policy-making role of the French Constitutional Council and the US Supreme Court. Her research will be supported by a fellowship from the Center for European Studies and a McDonald Long research fellowship (both from the University of Texas at Austin).
Abby will present two papers co-authored with Prof. Daniel Brinks titled "The Role of Domestic Politics and Diffusion in Judicial Design" and "The Conceptualization and Measurement of Formal Judicial Power" at the American Political Science Association annual conference in Seattle in September 2011. In April, 2011 she presented a paper titled "Dictators, Democrats, and Their Courts: Judicial Institutions in Latin America from 1975 to 2009" (also co-authored with Prof. Brinks) at the University of Michigan conference "How Autocracies Work: Beyond the Electoral Paradigm".
She recently published a chapter titled "Explaining Members Voting Behavior" in the Oxford Handbook of the American Congress (2011) co-authored with Professor Sean Theriault, and she co-authored an article titled "Corruption, Political Participation and Appetite for Reform: Americans' Assessment of the Role of Money in Politics" (manuscript under review) with Profs. Daron Shaw and Brian Roberts.
Abby is also a researcher for the Comparative Constitutions Project, an NSF-funded initiative to collect data on the formal characteristics of written constitutions for all independent states since 1789 in order to investigate the sources and consequences of constitutional choices, directed by Professors Zach Elkins and Tom Ginsburg.
Abby has extensive supplementary training: she is an alumnus of the University of Michigan Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) summer program in quantitative research methods, the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-method Research (IQMR), the University of Texas Summer Statistics Institute (SSI), and the Middlebury Summer Language Program (French School).