Ben Ansell Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford, and the BBC's 2023 Reith Lecturer

Ben Ansell is Professor Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College.

In 2023, he was the BBC's annual Reith Lecturer, giving lectures based on his book Why Politics Fails, published by Penguin in the UK and translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. He is the author of one of the UK's most read Substacks on politics: Political Calculus, and he hosts the Tortoise podcast What's Wrong with Democracy?

Ben received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2006 and taught at the University of Minnesota before arriving in Oxford.

Ben is an award-winning author, having written three academic books on education, inequality, democracy and public services for Cambridge University Press. He has worked for His Majesty's Treasury on the Leitch Review of Skills, was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project WEALTHPOL, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.