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

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.

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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.