University of Oxford
Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford where he researches a variety of topics in political economy including education, housing, inequality, and democracy. He is co-editor of the academic journal Comparative Political Studies, Fellow of the British Academy, and the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project ‘The Politics of Wealth Inequality’.
He has written three books with Cambridge University Press. The first, From the Ballot to the Blackboard, on the political economy of education was awarded the 2011 William Riker prize for best book in political economy. His second book, co-authored with David Samuels, Inequality and Democratization, won both the 2015 William Riker prize and the 2015 Woodrow Wilson prize of the American Political Science Association. His most recent book, co-authored with Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest, examines the development of modern public services from policing to asylums to vaccinations. He is currently writing Why Politics Fails, for publication by Penguin Random House and PublicAffairs in 2023. He has also published academic articles in many of the discipline’s top journals including International Organization, World Politics, and the American Political Science Review. His work has been covered in venues as diverse as the World Bank’s World Development Report, the New York Times, The Economist, The Times, and BBC Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’.