Biography

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College and the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018.

In 2023, Ben delivered the BBC Reith Lectures, the most prestigious annual lecture series in Britain, exploring the challenges facing democracy in the modern world. He is the host of BBC Radio 4's Rethink (2024-) and writes as UK Politics Columnist for Prospect magazine (2025-).

From 2025-2030, Ben serves as the Inaugural Director of the Centre for Advanced Social Science Methods (CASSM) at the University of Oxford. He is also co-editor of Comparative Political Studies, one of the leading journals in political science.

Research Interests

Ben's research focuses on the political economy of inequality, housing, education, and democratic institutions. His work examines how wealth and property ownership shape political preferences and policy outcomes across advanced democracies.

From 2017-2022, he led the WEALTHPOL project, funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (1.7m Euros), investigating "The Politics of Wealth Inequality and Mobility in the 21st Century."

Education

Ben received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2006, where his dissertation "From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education" was awarded the Senator Charles Sumner Memorial Dissertation Prize. He holds an M.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley (2001), an M.A. in Cultural History from the University of Manchester (1999), and a First Class Honours degree in History from Manchester (1998).

Previous Positions

Before joining Oxford in 2013, Ben was Associate Professor (2012-2013) and Assistant Professor (2006-2012) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He also served as a policy analyst for Her Majesty's Treasury Productivity Team and was a member of the Leitch Review of Skills for the UK government (2005-2007).