Why Politics Fails

The Five Traps of the Modern World and How to Escape Them

By: Ben Ansell

Narrated by: Ben Ansell

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

©2023 Ben Ansell (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Ben Ansell is one of the world's leading experts on the dilemmas facing modern democracies. This book will be a compelling and utterly gripping picture of the politics of exactly those issues that matter most to all of us." (Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die)

"Since social science disentangled itself from religion in the 17th century, scholars and intellectuals have been grappling with the best way to organize government and cope with the problems and conflicts that inevitably arise when humans live together in societies. Ben Ansell's book brings together the wisdom of what we have learned and how it can help us organize ourselves better. Salutary reading for the world we live in now." (James A. Robinson, 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)