Graciela Abinader ‘22

Graciela Abinader is a junior majoring in marketing and political science. She grew up in the Dominican Republic where she witnessed the democratic perils of a state with weak institutions in which the government is not accountable to the law. This drove her research interests to center around the importance of a strong rule of law in Latin American countries. She is interested in studying the relationship between governmental immunity, judicial misconduct, and democratization in Latin America. She is also interested in studying the link between weak institutions and human rights violations in developing countries.

Currently, she is working with Professor Aníbal Pérez-Liñán on his project about judicial independence in Europe and the Americas. Her current research focuses in analyzing the changes in the composition of various Latin American and European Supreme Court of Justice to determine the underlying legal and political factors that manipulate these changes. Previously, she helped Professor Pérez-Liñán by determining the events that provoked change in the composition of the Dominican Supreme Court of Justice. In the Dominican Republic, she performed numerous interviews with ex-magistrates of the Supreme Court for the purpose of the research.