Why politics fails

10-Minute Talks

Sharing insights from his book 'Why Politics Fails', in this 10-Minute Talk Ben Ansell FBA unpacks the challenges of democracy. Given that humans rarely agree, there can be no such thing as the ‘will of the people’ – which is why it’s so difficult to override individual self-interest in favour of our collective interest in resolving some of our most pressing political problems. From the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Brexit, hear about the importance of losers’ consent and “agreeable” disagreement.

Please note, at 3:34 the spelling of the Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth should be S-E-J-M.

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

This podcast is for informative and educational purposes.
10-Minute Talks are a series of pre-recorded talks from Fellows of the British Academy, published on YouTube and also available on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/10-minute-talks/id1530020476

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