Welcome! My name is Abigail Heller and I am a data scientist and political scientist. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from Emory University. My research is focused on comparative political institutions: electoral system change (i.e., electoral reform), electoral systems, party systems, and political parties.  I study these topics across both democracies and autocracies using experimental and quantitative methods. My dissertation, entitled “Re-examining Electoral Reform: The Role of Voters and Party Backbenchers,” was comprised of three papers exploring understudied aspects of electoral reform: 1) the role of voters and what affects voter support for electoral reform; 2) electoral reforms other than changes to the electoral formula (or the way votes are translated to seats); and 3) the non-unitary nature of political parties and what affects support for electoral reform among individual legislators.

While at Emory, I was the 2020-2021 Research and Engagement Graduate Fellow with the Emory Libraries and Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. Additionally, during the 2018-2019 academic year, I was the Election Monitoring (ELMO) Initiative Graduate Fellow with the Democracy Program at The Carter Center and Emory's Institute for Developing Nations.

I have an M.A. in Political Science from Emory University. Prior to coming to Emory, I received my M.Sc. in Politics and Government in the European Union from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My master's thesis was entitled "Nationalism versus Neoliberalism? Explaining Euroscepticism within the British Conservative Party". I received my B.A. in Government from Franklin and Marshall College (F&M). There, I received departmental honors and the Arthur King Kunkel Prize in Government for Excellence as Demonstrated by Independent Research for my thesis, "Electoral Reform in the United Kingdom: Lessons From the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum".