Elizabeth Stein's research focuses on political communication, contentious politics and comparative political economy in democratic and authoritarian regimes. Much of her work is focused on Latin America with an emphasis on Brazil and the Southern Cone countries. 

Her research addresses (1) the role of information in authoritarian regimes, examining how opposition leaders observe media-state interactions to make strategic decisions about mass mobilization in the struggle against repressive regimes; (2) dictators' evolving approach to investment in and control of information and communication technologies (ICT) based on the changing calculus of risks vserus rewards; (3) why and how presidents constrain media freedom in democracies and, in turn, how declining media freedom affects the quality of democracy; and (4) how ownership of regional media by politicians and their families, as well as politicians' use of public resources for state-sponsored advertising, influence electoral outcomes at the state and municipal level in Brazil.

Her research has been published in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Political Communication, Journal of Latin American Politics and the International Journal of Press/Politics as well as in edited volumes published by Palgrave MacMillan.

Elizabeth Stein began her academic career as an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, part of Louisiana's public university system. She moved to New Orleans as part of the department's rebuilding effort a few years after Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana's state politics resulted in perennial budget cuts that ultimately led to the elimination of her position and subsequently the end of the graduate program in political science. Despite loving her job and the city of New Orleans, she needed to move on; she ventured south to Brazil, where she worked as an assistant professor at the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos [The Institute for Social and Political Studies], a research and graduate studies institute, affiliated with the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ). She lived and worked in Brazil for three years until the country's economic crisis forced her to seek economic refuge back in the United States, where she accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position in Indiana University's International Studies Department, housed in the School of Global and International Studies (SGIS) [now named the Hamilton-Lugar School of Global and International Studies]. She simultaneously served as the inaugural Mark Helmke Postdoctoral Fellow on Global Media, Development, and Democracy, co-sponsored by SGIS and the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), which is part of the National Endowment for Democracy.  Before arriving at Wesleyan University in her current position in the department of government, Stein worked as an assistant professor of political science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York (essentially located in Canada but without the benefit of national healthcare).