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Monday 2 February 2026, 5.00pm – 6.45pm
Nissan Institute Lecture Theatre, St Antony’s College
What isn’t working in contemporary politics – and why: is the problem the civil service, the press, the public, the courts or politicians themselves?
The difficulties in making change happen are often attributed to different ‘blobs’. How can you build an eco-system for delivery in the modern era?
Speakers:
Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and writes regularly on politics and policy for the Observer the FT and others. Sam’s substack newsletter ‘Comment is Freed’ is the most popular in the UK and has over 80,000 subscribers. His first book Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How to Fix It was released in July, made the Sunday Times bestseller list and was named an Economist, FT and Daily Telegraph book of the year. Sam is also a senior adviser to the education charity Ark; Vice-Chair of Ambition Institute; and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust.
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. His second book, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, coauthored with David Samuels and published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 won the Woodrow Wilson APSA Best Book Prize and the William H. Riker best book in political economy prize. His third book, coauthored with Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Public Services, was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. 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.