New Books in Political Science 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, explains how major corporate scandals can turn diffuse public concern into political pressure. He discusses vivid framing, privacy and platform harms, historic cases like VW and Cambridge Analytica, and when scandals succeed or fail at driving democratic reform.
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The Timberwolf Deal That Exposed Conflicted Selling
- Goldman packaged subprime mortgages into mezzanine CDOs while secretly betting they would fail.
- The Timberwolf mezzanine CDO showed Goldman sold toxic products to clients while simultaneously shorting the market.
Why Latent Opinion Is The True Political Threat
- Distinguishing latent, activated, and mass opinion explains when scandals matter politically.
- Latent opinion is simmering public unease that scandals can activate into mass pressure that politicians must heed.
How Cambridge Analytica Sparked Privacy Laws
- Cambridge Analytica scraped data from 90 million Facebook users via a personality app and claimed it could micro-target voters.
- That scandal activated privacy concerns and helped spur California privacy initiatives and EU legislation like the Digital Markets Act.
