Hao Xi

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Waterloo (ABD), and I will be on the academic job market in Fall 2026.

My research sits at the intersection of political economy, comparative politics, and urban governance, with a comparative focus on China and Canada. My work centers on three interrelated questions: why ambitious public commitments so often diverge from material delivery; how political incentives and intergovernmental dynamics drive this gap; and through what temporal logic — specifically, how short-term electoral and bureaucratic pressures collide with long-term project lifecycles.

One line of my work examines how local officials' career incentives drive infrastructure commitments in China. My research on subway expansion, forthcoming in The China Review, shows that officials facing tenure uncertainty systematically overbid on transit projects as a form of political insurance.

A second line focuses on Canadian urban politics, examining how cities navigate federal-provincial-municipal tensions to secure infrastructure funding and deliver transit projects. My work on Ottawa's LRT and on intergovernmental friction in Canadian infrastructure delivery is currently under review at leading Canadian public policy journals.

Methodologically, I draw on causal inference, machine learning, and text analysis. I hold a Graduate Diploma in Computational Data Analytics for the Social Sciences and Humanities from the University of Waterloo.