Tiffany Simon

Tiffany Simon is a Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She received her PhD in Politics from Princeton University, where she specialized in comparative politics, Middle East politics, and formal and quantitative methods. Her research focuses on governance, political behavior, and state-society relations.

Her book project, Happiness and Political Control: Winning Compliance in the Arab Gulf, examines how state-led social policy and wellbeing initiatives shape citizen satisfaction, political participation, and policy demands in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The project draws on large-scale social media analysis, natural language processing, survey experiments, and qualitative fieldwork.

Tiffany also studies how civic engagement influences service delivery and political accountability in Pakistan. Her research has been supported by J-PAL and the International Growth Centre.

Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a Senior Research Manager at Evidence for Policy Design at the Harvard Kennedy School and worked at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva. She holds an MPA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a BA in political science and economics from UCLA.