Welcome to Democracy-ish. I'm Danielle Moody.

I'm a Mujat Ali.

And we are very excited to be joined by an esteemed political expert, professor and author Ben Ansel,

but I will kick it over to Wage to what has become our favorite pastime here on Democracy

Ish, our movie phone intro. Ben Ansel is the author of the new book Why Politics Fail.

Ben Ansel is also a professor of comparative democratic institutions in the Department

of Politics and International Relations and a professorial fellow at Nutfield College.

He received his PhD from Harvard and also studied at Oxford, and he has a British accent, which means anything he says

is correct, and we must follow him. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. I tried my best.

Thank you. Well, that was really, that was really great. It just makes me so embarrassed about

the length of this title. I thought you might run out of breath before you got to be English.

I tried. I think professorial is the finally thing, the thing of this title. I thought you might run out of breath before you got to be. I tried.

I think professorial is the finally thing, the thing that got me.

I was doing really well until professorial, and I'm like, damn Brits, they got me.

Okay.

Well, the reason it's so long is because I interviewed the two jobs, and they couldn't

decide which to give me, so they just combined all the words into one really long title. I love that for you. I'm due to have this forever now, but there we are. Do you, on your,

on your card, do you have like an eight font, all of it in three lines? You know, this is why I'm so

glad that business cards don't exist anymore. Because when I taught at the University of Minnesota for seven years,

and the first thing I did when I got the job is I got business cards.

I got like boxes and boxes of them, and I gave out two.

And that was like.

...