Event Recording:

The last decade has seen a surge of interest in economic inequality and widely read books about its social and political consequences by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, and Larry Bartels. Yet most scholarship focuses on incomes, neglecting the massive inequalities that exist and are widening in the ownership of assets: from residential to financial wealth.

In this talk, Professor Ben Ansell, building off his ERC project WEALTHPOL, will examine the potential impact of wealth inequality on contemporary politics, from standard economic debates such as taxation to the rise of populist parties.

About the speaker

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College. He received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2006 and conducts research in a wide area of comparative politics and political economy.

Before joining Oxford and Nuffield College he was an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His initial research focus was the politics of education, with his book From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Politics of Education, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and winning the William H. Riker prize for best book in political economy. He is currently working on the interplay between inequality and democratization and on the effects of housing price booms and busts on political preferences. The former research has culminated in Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014.

His work has been published in International Organization, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and the American Political Science Review. From September 2013, together with David Samuels at the University of Minnesota, he has been co-editor of Comparative Political Studies.