Every year, Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences welcomes exceptional scholars across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This series profiles six of the faculty joining the FAS in the 2025–26 academic year, highlighting their academic achievements, research ambitions, and the teaching they hope to do at Yale. Learn more about the incoming faculty joining the FAS.
Since the first day she set foot in Jordan, Elizabeth Parker-Magyar has been full of questions.
As she spent more time there—as an undergraduate studying abroad during the Arab Spring, then as a Fulbright fellow teaching English, and then as a journalist and in the policy world—she knew she would need more time to answer them.
Now when she travels to the Middle East, it’s as a political scientist.
Politics on the ground
Parker-Magyar, an Assistant Professor of Political Science joining Yale this fall, studies contemporary comparative politics of the Middle East, particularly “contentious” politics— those that happen “on the street” in the form of protests, social movements, revolutions, and civil society organizations.
Her research interests are shaped by her experiences working and teaching in Jordan, as well as those of her former colleagues there. These stories inspired her current book project, which examines how state workers influence politics and policy in Jordan, often in surprising ways. She’s focused on the fact that public sector workers—doctors, teachers, engineers, phosphate workers, and other frontline workers—are often very engaged in contentious politics.
“We have a tendency to think of how state workers engage in politics, especially in non-democratic regimes, as a function of how they got their jobs. There’s this idea that in order to get a job in a non-democratic regime, you need an uncle in a certain position, or you were chosen because of your political beliefs—and therefore whatever you do next reflects those underlying connections or beliefs,” she explains. “But my research really focuses on the idea that that’s not necessarily the case. There is quite a high degree of meritocracy in many non-democratic regimes, and state workers can also draw from the networks they develop and the experiences they have working within those regimes, governments, polities, or states tend to be really influential actors in a puzzling way.”
Parker-Magyar feels it’s important to illuminate the agency of people living in non-democratic states, and notes that there can be a tendency in political science to see a hard binary between political behavior in non-democratic and democratic regimes. She utilizes an array of research methods to understand the activity, importance, and influence of public sector workers: interviews, attending public meetings, surveys, observations, and network data.
The network data has interesting implications for possible policy choices in Jordan. “I was able to field a survey in a set of Jordanian public schools and public health centers where I asked colleagues how they solve problems and who they interact with every day,” she says.
She then connected public sector workers’ behavior within the workplace to their engagement within and beyond the workplace—particularly their participation in contentious politics—to understand how they enter into and advocate for change across various sectors.
“There are strong differences in social networks across different types of public sector institutions, which emphasizes the extreme diversity of what it can mean to be a public sector employee.”
Collaboration and comparative politics
Parker-Magyar also frequently works alongside other social scientists to explore politics and conflict throughout the Middle East. One such collaboration resulted in a recent paper about how narratives around violent conflict in Syria varied across social media platforms. Working with a team of computational social scientists, Parker-Magyar and her collaborators gathered parallel data from different social media platforms about how users described the Syrian civil war.
It was important, she says, to use computational methods to demonstrate something many social media users might find intuitive—that one posts differently on each platform, whether it’s professional networking site LinkedIn, the more informal Twitter and Instagram, or intimate chats on Telegram. The team also sent short questionnaires to Syrian users, including journalists, who described how they used different platforms, including writing posts that might contextualize the conflict for a global audience on Twitter, versus sending out up-to-the-minute airstrike warnings over Telegram.
“One of the most interesting implications of the research—which I think is very relevant to our day-to-day lives—is that the platforms you are using are going to shape your perspective on the conflict,” Parker-Magyar says. “If you’re an observer or more distant to the conflict—whether or not it’s taking place in your hometown and you’ve had to flee, or you’re a foreign journalist—the day-to-day messaging that you receive about what the conflict is about and the costs of the conflict are very different according to the platforms where you look.”
The study’s aims are consistent with Parker-Magyar’s commitment to describing what life and politics are like on the ground. She’ll continue to do this in her teaching as well: in her fall course “Politics and Regimes of the Contemporary Middle East,” she is eager for students to study the region not only through a macro political lens, but also with a street-level view.
One assignment, in which students will focus on a single country, will expose them to a work of art or literature from that country. “I think that watching films, reading novels, and the ability to engage with the human experience of living in a certain context complicates many of the neatest theories we have about the region,” she says. “It forces students to really think through some of the most difficult choices people make about how and when to engage in political life.”
The course will also include many classic texts from the field of comparative politics and the study of autocratic politics. “We’re going to be in a social science class that asks questions that comparative politics is ultimately very concerned about,” she notes. “But because we are having that conversation from so far away, I think it’s important to have students engage as much as possible with street level life as we can.”
The assignment echoes findings from Parker-Magyar’s research and her own time in Jordan. “I think that teacher’s union activists in the US would have a lot to discuss with the teacher’s union activists that I met in Jordan,” she points out. “Being a public school teacher in Jordan or being a doctor in Jordan—fundamentally, you’re teaching or providing health care, and you’re engaging with debates not only on your paycheck but also around insurance, around the curriculum, around standardized testing. Though these activists can face far steeper challenges to secure a seat at the table, many of the issues they engage on are very recognizable.”
Parker-Magyar hopes her students will see that many of the concerns that guide the protagonists in the novels or films are similarly recognizable—a divorce, mourning a loved one, receiving a bicycle for your birthday—even as newsworthy politics like conflict or revolution intrude on those characters’ daily lives. “One framework that resonates with me is the idea that not only should we learn not only about Middle East politics, but we should also learn from Middle East politics. How can we learn from this setting about other settings?”
As she continues to pursue her many research questions, Parker-Magyar is also keen to mentor students who are interested in comparative politics. “I really enjoy mentorship, and I think the possibility of mentoring students who might go on to academia, but who might also go on to be a journalist or a policy maker, is very exciting.”
To those students interested in gaining research experience: “I always have opportunities for research,” she says with a grin.
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