Why Politics Fails

A meticulous study of how different societies find it so difficult to achieve widely shared goals, like democracy, equality, a decent welfare state, security from crime and sustainable prosperity – Nick Pearce * Financial Times *Salutary reading for the world we live in now – James A. Robinson, co-author of Why Nations FailBrilliant … a must-read – Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Why Nations FailI think the book is beautifully written and engaging. Ben has the rare gift of writing like he talks, and even when he gets out of storytelling mode into “here’s the facts” it’s an engaging read. I also think book-readers are ready for a message that isn’t telling us that we are marching steadily towards a better world. Nor does hopeless disaster - endless polarization, climate apocalypse - await humanity. The truth, as usual, is in the middle. Politics is hard. There are trade-offs. If we want to build a better society, let’s put aside naive optimism and pessimism and get more sophisticated – Chris Blattman, author of Why We FightA must-read … In an era of great challenges to the world, the urgency of what Ansell shows us, practical ways to overcoming political obstacles to collective decision making, is all the more timely – Victor Shih, UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy 

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Following a PhD at Harvard he taught at the University of Minnesota for several years, becoming a full Professor at Oxford in 2013 at the age of thirty-five. He was made Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, among the youngest fellows at that time. His work has been widely covered in the media, including in The Times, The New York Times, Economist and on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’. He is the Principal Investigator of the multi-million-pound ERC project ‘The Politics of Wealth Inequality’, co-editor of the most-cited journal in comparative politics and has written three award-winning academic books. This is his first for a general reader.