Murphy Seminar in Political Science: "Segregation, Spatial Externalities, and the Privatization of Urban Services"

Each semester The Murphy Institute sponsors a series of seminars organized by the Tulane Department of Political Science that provides an opportunity for faculty, researchers, and practitioners to present their latest research and pressing issues related to topics in political economy. Research presented covers all aspects of contemporary politics science, including comparative politics, public policy, international relations, American politics, and normative theory.  

Alice Xu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice and the Department of Political Science (secondary appointment). She studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on the politics of inequality and social policy, urban and distributive politics, and environmental politics in the Global South. 

Her book project explores how patterns of class- and race-based segregation shapes urban and distributive politics across cities in Brazil and Mexico. She also has research interests in quantitative and spatial methods for studying inequality. Her research received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Best Paper on Social and Economic Inequality award (Class and Inequality Section) in 2021 and APSA’s Paul A. Sabatier Best Conference Paper award (Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics Section) in 2022. She is also the 2023 recipient of the Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award from the APSA Urban Politics Section. 

Abstract:

Why do cities of comparable size and fiscal capacity provide different levels of public goods? I argue that politically polarized cities under-provide public goods. In particular, the geographic configuration of cities –their degree of class-based segregation– determines patterns of polarization and of cross-class political coalitions that form to address the spatial externalities between groups. Segregated cities have reduced spatial externalities (e.g., sewage run-off, waterborne diseases, organized crime) that spill over from impoverished “slum” settlements to the middle class. Conversely, in integrated (de-segregated) cities, the scale of such externalities undermines the efficacy of private services (e.g., private security), thereby inducing middle-class preferences for externalities-correcting public goods and their civic engagement in city politics. Thus, while segregation encourages the privatization of urban services, integration aligns the middle class with the poor in coalitions that support public goods. I illustrate how the argument applies to the location of streetlights, the extension of sewer lines, the stationing of policing units, and investments in public schooling. Drawing on focus groups from city cases, a proposed quasi-experimental strategy, and door-to-door survey of over 4,000 households across 420 neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil, this book project documents how patterns of urban geographies, by shaping opportunities for "exit" into private service provision, have major distributive and political implications for city politics.

RSVP: https://tulane.campuslabs.com/engage/event/11061934
 

For more information, contact the Department of Political Science at polisci@tulane.edu.