Brilliant ... a must-read Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Why Nations Fail
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Why do the revolving doors of power always leave us disappointed? In Why Politics Fails, award-winning Oxford professor Ben Ansell shows that it s not the politicians that are the problem, it s that our collective goals result in five political traps .
Democracy: we all want a say in how we re governed, but it s impossible to have any true will of the people . Equality: we want to be treated equally, but equal rights and equal outcomes undermine each other. Solidarity: we want a safety net when times are tough, but often we care about solidarity only when we need it ourselves. Security: we want protecting from harm, but not if it undermines our freedoms. Prosperity: we want to be richer tomorrow, but what makes us richer in the short run makes us poorer over the long haul.
You ve probably noticed a pattern here, which is that our self-interest undermines our ability to deliver on our collective goals. And these traps reinforce one another, so a polarized democracy can worsen inequality; a threadbare social safety net can worsen crime; runaway climate change will threaten global peace.
Drawing on examples from Ancient Greece through Brexit and using his own counterintuitive and pathbreaking research - on why democracy thrives under high inequality, and how increased political and social equality can lead to greater class inequality - Ansell vividly illustrates how we can escape the political traps of our imperfect world. He shows that politics won t end, but that it doesn t have to fail.
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A meticulous study of how different societies find it so difficult to achieve widely shared goals Financial Times
Incisive and gripping Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die
Salutary reading for the world we live in now James A. Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail
About the Author
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. This is his first for a general reader.
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