Why Politics Fails: The Five Traps of the Modern World & How to Escape Them

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An award-winning Oxford professor explains why the revolving doors of power always leave us disappointed - and how to fix it 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.

Reviews

A meticulous study of how different societies find it so difficult to achieve widely shared goals, like democracy, equality, a decent welfare state, security from crime and sustainable prosperity -- Nick Pearce * Financial Times *
Salutary reading for the world we live in now -- James A. Robinson, co-author of Why Nations Fail
Brilliant ... a must-read -- Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Why Nations Fail
I think the book is beautifully written and engaging. Ben has the rare gift of writing like he talks, and even when he gets out of storytelling mode into "here's the facts" it's an engaging read. I also think book-readers are ready for a message that isn't telling us that we are marching steadily towards a better world. Nor does hopeless disaster - endless polarization, climate apocalypse - await humanity. The truth, as usual, is in the middle. Politics is hard. There are trade-offs. If we want to build a better society, let's put aside naive optimism and pessimism and get more sophisticated -- Chris Blattman, author of Why We Fight
A must-read ... In an era of great challenges to the world, the urgency of what Ansell shows us, practical ways to overcoming political obstacles to collective decision making, is all the more timely -- Victor Shih, UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy

Author Bio

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 Times, The New York Times, Economist 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.