The five political traps and tackling the housing crisis with Professor Ben Ansell

The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

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4.3 • 105 Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

In this episode of 'UKICE (I Tell)' - formerly known as 'Brexit and Beyond' - Professor Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, talks to Professor Anand Menon about his new book, 'Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them', the merits of proportional representation and the politics of the housing crisis. --- 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 World Bank's World Development Report, The New York Times, The Economist, The Times 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. 'Why Politics Fails' is his first for a general reader.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to this next installment of the U-Kis-I-Tel podcast. And my guest today is none
0:12.7	other than Ben Anself. Anyone who's on Twitter will know Ben already, but he's professor of
0:17.4	comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. It's a slight
0:23.9	sinking feeling I have about this podcast because Ben writes so much about so much. A, I'm
0:29.1	profoundly jealous and B, it's hard to know where to start, except he's got a new book out called
0:34.9	Why Politics Fails. So Ben, welcome.
0:39.5	Thank you and Anne for having me.
0:44.2	Let me do my customary bookway for the people who watch I Kiss, You Tell.
0:45.2	Is it I Kiss You Tell?
0:46.9	You kiss, I tell.
0:49.0	You kiss I tell. That's a great start.
0:50.1	Yeah, good.
0:57.7	Yeah, the book is also broad. So I do write about a lot of issues in contemporary British politics and maybe we can come on to those later. But the book was an attempt by me to
1:04.0	boil down a lot of big, big issues that Anand and I and other political scientists have to talk
1:09.9	about all the time across a whole
1:12.1	variety of domains to get to a core question, which is why is it so, so hard to get the kind of
1:19.7	policies and get the outcomes that most of us think we agree on? And so the way that I structure
1:24.9	the book is to say, there are things that we all broadly agree on.
1:30.5	So we would all like a democracy that gives us some form of self-government, where what the people want somehow becomes the policy that we get.
1:41.3	We would all like to be somewhat equal in the sense that
1:44.4	most of us recoil at a kind of Oliver Twist world in which there's just a few with a lot of
1:51.1	money and everybody else doesn't have any. We'd all like, if we got sick, to be looked after.
	...

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