Trapped! Democracy's struggle to cope with modern life and what we can do to help – a conversation with Professor Ben Ansell.

Politics on the Couch

On this edition Rafael Behr talks to Professor Ben Ansell about his new book Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. 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 was the Principal Investigator of the multi-million-pound ERC project 'The Politics of Wealth Inequality', is co-editor of the most-cited journal in comparative politics, and has written three award-winning academic books. Why Politics Fail is his latest book and his first for a wider audience.

Link to buy Ben's new book

https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/284663/ben-ansell

Link to Ben's substack

https://benansell.substack.com

Rafael Behr's first book was released Thursday 4 May, 2023

**'Politics, A Survivor’s Guide,'** is all about the infuriating toxicity of politics, how it got that way and how to resist the slide into cynicism and pessimism that are so corrosive of democracy. It’s about the challenge of staying engaged without getting enraged; the need to empathise with people whose views we cannot share and how that is different to appeasement of politics we believe to be dangerous.

Available from Waterstones:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/politics-a-survivors-guide/rafael-behr/9781838955045

Or, for those who are interested in signed copies, from City Books in Hove:

https://www.city-books.co.uk

Politics on the Couch has been chosen by Feedspot as both one of the Top 25 UK Psychology Podcasts, and Top 25 Political Science Podcasts on the web.

https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_psychology_podcasts

https://blog.feedspot.com/political_science_podcasts

---

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.