“People wave signs saying ‘they're getting you to hate immigrants so you don't hate billionaires’. I think that's exactly right”, says Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy.
Known for his fast talking and quick wit, Pepper is coming to the end of his term as Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at the Blavatnik School, and is also a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. A political scientist, he works in the field of political economy – that is, the study of how economic systems, such as markets and national economies, interact with political systems.
“Does capitalism dominate democracy, or vice versa? That’s a question I’m interested in”, says Pepper.
His view is that corporations are very successful in getting what they want within political systems – for example, around regulation of business. This may seem an uncontroversial, even obvious, position: many have observed that giant companies, not governments, seem to run the world, whether launching rockets into space, controlling satellite communication, or developing era-defining AI technologies.
But this is not, apparently, the standard view in Pepper’s field. “Political scientists tend to say that corporations are always losing, because politicians are chasing re-election, therefore looking to what the average voter wants”, says Pepper.
He takes a different view. “That ‘average voter’ model has some applicability when lots of people are paying attention. But most of the time, people are not paying attention.”
He points out that people are paying least attention to economic regulation or other ‘hard issues’ where they would need to think carefully about complicated issues to puzzle out where their personal interests lie. In these seemingly ‘quiet’ areas, business is lobbying hard in the background.
Pepper’s 2012 book Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan (Cambridge University Press) evidenced how, in these circumstances, the preferences of businesses usually win out. The book won the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.
Banking scandals, public opinion and policy
Pepper joined the Blavatnik School in 2016. “The mission commitment that drives people at the School every day is something that I've really not found in any other institution I've been to. I love that. I love working with my colleagues knowing that we're driven by the same desire to do good social science that makes the world better.”
In 2018, he won a €2.5m ERC Advanced Grant for Banklash, a project to understand how the bailout of the banks in 2008 and the public reaction to the financial crisis changed politics.
He and the team found that corporate scandals were powerful in facilitating policy change. Unlike political scandals, where reactions these days tend to diverge along partisan lines, corporate scandals can still create widely shared moral outrage. “One of the big insights of Banklash was that there is widespread latent public hostility towards corporations – hostility which scandals focus, concentrate and make politically active.”
As well as articles in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and many others, this insight led to Pepper’s latest book (with Taeku Lee), The Billionaire Backlash: The age of corporate scandal and how it could save democracy (Bloomsbury, 2026), which is based on their large body of original research, including surveys of over 60,000 people in six advanced democracies. The work has featured in The Economist and the book was recommended in the Financial Times and others.
The backlash against billionaires and corporations
The authors start from the position that “a situation where large company lobbyists effectively write the laws that are then rubber-stamped by the legislature is not a democracy worth the name.” Pepper points out that people can sit on a variety of positions along the traditional left–right spectrum and still agree that “massive corporations writing the rules for themselves is a bad idea”. That shared view can be harnessed, say the authors, into what they call “good populism”.
Pepper explains: “In several countries, most notably the US, we’re seeing a descent into oligarchic populism, in which billionaires and large corporations continue to call the shots beneath a veneer of anti-elite pandering. Latent anger is diverted towards minorities rather than powerful business interests.”
But while change may be inevitable, Pepper and co-author Taeku Lee think this negative kind of populism is not. While some look at today’s politics and see the 1930s, they see the 1900s, when new technologies had changed the world and the so-called ‘robber barons’ – the titans of industry – had outsized power. At that time, the Progressive Movement in the USA took on the robber barons and built a new regulatory framework and a range of other laws that protected the interests of ordinary people. Pepper thinks something similar is possible today, and that the programme has appeal that cuts across traditional political lines. “A policy programme that tackles corporate domination of democracy responds to public anger and represents a potential ‘good populism’.”
International interests
An American, 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. “Oxford is a really amazing place: this international convening centre”, he says. “As someone who studies how politics works in many countries, it feels very much like home to me.”
Teaching current and future leaders
One the School’s Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree, Pepper teaches on the Politics of Policymaking module, which prepares students to be successful agents for change by learning how to think politically. Pepper teaches the part on interest groups and social movements – the advantages that certain interest groups, including business, have in influencing policy, and how those advantages can be overcome by social movements to alter the status quo.
He also runs an Applied Policy Module on policy implementation using the example of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, a landmark piece of regulation targeting Big Tech and preventing them from abusing their market power and stifling smaller competitors and start-ups. Here he leads student discussion alongside Margrethe Vestager, who spearheaded the act when she was European Commissioner for Competition (she was later an Executive Vice President of the European Commission and is now a World Leaders Fellow at the Blavatnik School). As well as having Margrethe in the classroom with them, students hear over video from several other people who were involved with the Act. They learn about the difficult, iterative, problem-solving process of making and implementing policy.
Pepper also teaches those at the top of their government departments or public sector agencies, and those on track to get there soon, through the Executive Public Leaders Programme and Rising Public Leaders Programme. Here, his sessions are on narrative and story-telling: “teaching people who've become very senior in government that they have to still be telling stories as opposed to relying solely on data.”
Being Vice-Dean
Pepper has been Vice-Dean for Academic Affairs since October 2020 and will complete his term in September 2026. The role involves having oversight of faculty, both in terms of overall mix and recruitment and as individuals. “The risk at the Blavatnik School is never that people will shirk; it’s that people will burn out, because they are so internally driven. That's the big job of Vice-Dean: seeing mission-driven people pushing themselves hard and trying to figure out how to get them to keep the hard push while not pushing too far.” He adds: “The part of the job that I love is mentoring, especially younger faculty, which is enormously rewarding. They're so smart and they've got the world before them.”