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How to think about politics [1]

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Date: 2025-03 

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by politics. At a time when many of us want to grasp what is going on, it is getting harder to do so. Rather than becoming caught up in the swirl of day-to-day events, Professor Peter Allen suggests that we instead return to the fundamentals and cultivate a set of tools and perspectives to help us interpret the political world.

Combining contemporary political science research with real-life examples, he focuses on five ideas that will help us to consider political events in a new way. Exploring power, representation, knowledge, interests, and possibility, he offers tools for thinking about politics that will us interrogate our own political choices. Underlining the importance of these five fundamental political ideas, he makes the case that the scope of what politics is and what it can achieve is often greater than we are told.

He will be in conversation with Aditya Chakrabortty, senior economics commentator for the Guardian.

About the speakers:

Peter Allen is Professor of Politics at the University of Bath and Co-Director of the Institute for Policy Research. His research focuses on political representation and political behaviour. His work has been funded by the ESRC, AHRC, and British Academy and he was a 2017 AHRC IPS Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC. He is the author of The Political Class (OUP, 2018), and How to Think about Politics: A Guide in Five Parts (OUP, 2025).

Aditya Chakrabortty is senior economics commentator for the Guardian, where he writes a regular column and reports from around Britain and the world. In 2017 he won the British Journalism Award for Comment Journalist of the year, and his work has also won a Social Policy Association award and a Harold Wincott prize for Business Journalism. He has been a finalist for an Orwell Prize for journalism in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and in 2023 won the British Press Award for Best Broadsheet Columnist of the year.

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[1] Url: https://theconversation.com/uk/events/prof-peter-allen-how-to-think-about-politics-14372

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