New Books in Economic and Business History 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, a political scientist who studies corporate power and regulation, explores how major corporate scandals can trigger political change. He discusses vivid hearings, high-profile cases like Cambridge Analytica and VW, how latent public anger becomes reform, differences between democratic and authoritarian responses, and why scandals may shape future regulation on tech, AI, and climate.
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How Scandals Make Complex Wrongs Legible
- Scandals transform complex corporate malfeasance into politically actionable stories that force elite attention.
- Carl Levin read subpoenaed Goldman emails and used the phrase "shitty deal" to make conflict-of-interest concrete, breaking the Dodd-Frank filibuster.
Latent Opinion Is The Scandal Fuel
- Distinguish latent opinion (back-of-mind concerns) from mass opinion; scandals activate latent worries into mass pressure.
- Activation requires underlying suspicion, anger, and clear, comprehensible information to move elites.
Cambridge Analytica Turned Privacy Worry Into Laws
- Cambridge Analytica scraped data from about 90 million Facebook users via a personality app, turning privacy worries into a vivid scandal.
- That shock pushed California to pass privacy initiatives and helped accelerate EU laws like the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.
