Professor Pepper Culpepper
Blavatnik Professor of Government, Blavatnik School of Government
Professor Culpepper is Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy and Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. His 2026 book with Taeku Lee – Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy – argues for the positive, and politically popular, role of government regulatory action against large corporations in an era of populism.
About
Professor Pepper Culpepper is Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. He is also a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. His research explores the intersection between capitalism and democracy.
His 2026 book with Taeku Lee – Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy – argues for the positive, and politically popular, role of government regulatory action against large corporations in an era of populism. The work builds on some of the scholarly insights from his five-year Advanced Grant Project funded by the European Research Council, which sought to understand how big banks and the rules that govern them became objects of political contestation after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.
Professor Pepper's 2011 book, Quiet Politics and Business Power was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. He is the author of Creating Cooperation and co-editor of Changing France (with Peter Hall and Bruno Palier) and The German Skills Machine (with David Finegold). He has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles.
His public commentary has appeared in The Conversation, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, The New Republic, Times Higher Education and The Washington Post. A recent article about his research in the Financial Times attracted more than one million Twitter/X views.
Professor Pepper obtained a PhD in political science from Harvard University, a BA from Duke University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and an MLitt from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has previously taught at the Harvard Kennedy School and the European University Institute in Italy. He was an Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo and has held long-term visiting appointments in France and Germany.
Expertise
- Capitalism and democracy
- Corporate scandals
- Economic regulation
- Politics of business
- Public attitudes towards billionaires
Selected publications
- Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2026)
- In the Metaverse, Politicians Can Hear You Scream: Corporate Scandals, Big Tech Regulation, and the Microfoundations of Focusing Events (Perspectives on Politics, 2026)
- Media effects revisited: corporate scandals, partisan narratives, and attitudes toward cryptocurrency regulation (Political Science Research & Methods, 2026)
- ‘The Economy is Rigged’: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries (Comparative Political Studies, 2024)
- Banklash: How Media Coverage of Bank Scandals Moves Mass Preferences on Financial Regulation (American Journal of Political Science, 2023)
- The art of the shitty deal: media frames and public opinion on financial regulation in the United States (Socio-Economic Review, 2022)
- Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006)
- Creating Cooperation: How States Develop Human Capital in Europe (Cornell University Press, 2003)
Recent media work
- Weathering the billionaire backlash (Spear's Magazine, 2026)
- Trump targets lawyers in ‘chilling’ attempt to silence critics (The Telegraph, 2025)
- Suspect in UnitedHealth executive murder was not a customer of the insurer (Reuters, 2024)
- FTX and Binance: how latest crypto scandals could influence public opinion on digital currency reg... (The Conversation, 2023)
- Does the American dream foster inequality? (Financial Times, 2023)
Languages
English, French, Italian