Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University
About
Allison Harris is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the Pennsylvania State University. During the 2016-2017 academic year, she was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. She received her doctoral degree in political science from the University of Chicago, and she was the 2017 recipient of the American Political Science Association's Edward S. Corwin Award for the best dissertation in the field of public law. She holds a public policy master's degree from Rutgers University and a bachelor's degree from Brown University.
Current Work:
Allison's research interests are in the subfield of American politics with a focus on judicial politics, state politics, representation, and political methodology. A great deal of her current research is focused on understanding the extent to which multiple types of diversity among judges (racial, gender, and ideological) affects individual judges' decisions. She has found, for example, that as the proportion of Black judges on a criminal court increases, individual judges (both White and Black) are less likely to give incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants.
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