Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College.
Ben conducts research in a wide area of comparative politics and political economy. Before joining Oxford and Nuffield College, he was Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.
In 2023 he was named as the BBC’s 73rd Reith lecturer, joining a highly-distinguished list of intellectual experts stretching back into the middle of the 20th century. His four lectures, titled 'Our Democratic Future', aimed to address the dilemma of how to build political systems that work for all and are robust enough to face the wide-ranging challenges of the 21st century.
The lectures were inspired by his most recent book: Why Politics Fails, which refer back to almost two decades of his research and cutting edge scholarship across the social sciences, to explain why politics fails so often. Ben continues to bring cutting edge social sciences to a mass audience in his BBC Radio 4 series Rethink.
Professor Ansell’s initial research focus was the politics of education and he has authored a number of books. His first book - From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Politics of Education - won the William H. Riker prize for best book in political economy.
His second book, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, co-authored with David Samuels, won the Woodrow Wilson APSA Best Book Prize and the William H. Riker best book in political economy prize.
His third book, co-authored with Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Public Services, was published in 2021.
His work has been published in International Organization, Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, and the American Political Science Review. His work has been covered in outlets including The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist, and The Times.
From September 2013, together with David Samuels at the University of Minnesota, he has been co-editor of Comparative Political Studies. He was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project WEALTHPOL and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor Ansell is the Inaugural Director of Oxford’s new Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods, a major University-backed initiative, beginning in Autumn 2025.
Professor Ansell grew up in northern Kent and after school in Sevenoaks, he went to Manchester University to study History. He stayed on for a Masters in cultural history, where a tutor recommended he consider studying Politics, which he did, starting out on his future career. In 2000, he moved to the US, where he completed a Masters in Political Science at UC Berkeley – followed by a doctorate in Government at Harvard.