New Books Network Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee, "Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Mar 14, 2026
Pepper Culpepper, political scientist and co-author of Billionaire Backlash, studies how corporate scandals reshape politics. He traces scandal origins from the 2008 crisis to Cambridge Analytica and Samsung. Short, vivid stories show how scandals make complex failures legible, spur regulation, and sometimes fail when polarization or convenience blunts public pressure.
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How Scandals Make Complex Wrongs Comprehensible
- Scandals convert complicated wrongdoing into a politically legible moment that can shift public pressure.
- Carl Levin used millions of emails and the phrase "shitty deal" to make Goldman Sachs' conflict of interest instantly comprehensible and mobilizing.
Latent Opinion Is The Scandal Fuel
- Public opinion exists in layers: mass, activated, and latent, and scandals can flip latent concerns into mass opinion.
- Latent opinion is the "iceberg" politicians fear because if activated it forces political response.
Cambridge Analytica Turned Privacy Into Policy
- Cambridge Analytica turned a diffuse privacy worry into a vivid scandal by harvesting data from ~90 million Facebook users via a personality app.
- That shock helped push California privacy initiatives and inspired EU laws like the Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts.
