How to Think about Politics

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, 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. How to Think About Politics is his concise and accessible guide to doing so. Mixing contemporary political science research with real-life examples, the book focuses on five ideas that will help readers to consider political events in a new way. Exploring power, representation, knowledge, interests, and possibility, this book offers tools for thinking about politics that will help readers interrogate their own political choices. Underlining the importance of these five fundamental political ideas, Allen makes the case that the scope of what politics is and what it can achieve is often greater than we are told.

Peter Allen is Professor of Politics at the University of Bath. 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 D.C. His first book The Political Class was published by Oxford University Press in April 2018.