Alice Xu receives Best Dissertation Award from American Political Science Association

Dr. Alice Xu, assistant professor at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2), has received the 2025 Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award by the American Political Science Association (APSA). The award honors the best dissertation in political economy completed within the previous two years and commemorates the legacy of political economist Mancur Olson.

Xu’s dissertation, Segregation and the Spatial Externalities of Inequality: A Theory of Interdependence and Public Goods in Cities, addresses the question: Why do cities of comparable size and fiscal capacity provide vastly different patterns of public goods? Her research reveals that politically polarized cities under-provide public goods, and that the geographic configuration of cities (i.e., segregation along class lines) shapes when cities become politically polarized and when they, instead, develop cross-class coalitions to support public goods over private alternatives.

Xu holds a primary appointment at SP2 and a secondary appointment in Penn’s Political Science Department. She specializes in the comparative political economy of development, with a focus on urban and distributive politics, the politics of inequality and social policy, and climate justice and environmental politics in the Global South.