“The Future of Democracy” is, for me, incredibly interesting.

I haven’t a clue as to how long I have been listening to the annual Reith Lecture on BBC Radio 4. It has been many years.

As Wikipedia explains:

The Reith Lectures is a series of annual BBC radio lectures given by leading figures of the day. They are commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service. The lectures were inaugurated in 1948 to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Lord Reith, the corporation’s first director-general.

Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service that aimed to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver the lectures. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about issues of contemporary interest.

Wikipedia

As the BBC explains on the BBC Sounds website:

Released On: 29 Nov 2023

Available for over a year

This year’s BBC Reith Lecturer is Ben Ansell, Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, Oxford University.

He will deliver four lectures called “Our Democratic Future,” asking how we can build a politics that works for all of us with systems which are robust to the challenges of the twenty first century, from climate change to artificial intelligence. In this first lecture, recorded at New Broadcasting House in London in front of an audience, Professor Ansell asks whether we are in a ‘democratic recession’, where longstanding democracies are at risk of breakdown and authoritarianism is resurgent. And he examines how resilient democracies are to the challenges of artificial intelligence, social media and if they can effectively address core challenges from climate change to inequality.

The Reith Lectures are presented by Anita Anand and produced by Jim Frank. The Editor is China Collins. Reith Co-ordinator is Brenda Brown. The series is mixed by Rod Farquhar and Neil Churchill.

Here is the link to that first lecture: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001sty4

Ben Ansell’s website is here, from which I have taken this:

Welcome to my website. I am Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. My work focuses on a variety of issues in political economy, including both comparative politics and international relations.

I am also co-editor (with David Samuels) of Comparative Political Studies.

My 2010 book, From the Ballot to the Blackboard, published by Cambridge University Press, is available here. My 2014 book (with David Samuels), Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, published by Cambridge University Press, is available here.

This site contains a variety of working papers, syllabi, my biography, and other information about my academic work. My CV is available here.