In an interview with the ECPS, Professor Pepper Culpepper argues that populism should not be treated as inherently anti-democratic. Rather, under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force that exposes failures of responsiveness and pressures elites to address neglected public demands. Drawing on his work on quiet politics, corporate scandal, and democratic accountability, Professor Culpepper distinguishes between populism rooted in political failure and that driven by economic unfairness. While the former can erode pluralism, the latter may help rebalance distorted relations between citizens, markets, and institutions. The interview offers a nuanced reflection on public anger, corporate power, and the democratic potential—as well as the dangers—of contemporary anti-elite mobilization.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
At a moment when democratic systems are under strain from two mutually reinforcing pressures—rising populist mobilization and the growing concentration of corporate power—the question of whether public anger can renew democratic accountability has acquired unusual urgency. In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor Pepper Culpepper, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Blavatnik Chair in Government and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, offers a careful but provocative answer. Drawing on his influential scholarship—from Quiet Politics to his recent book Billionaire Backlash— Professor Culpepper argues that populism should not be understood simply as a threat to democracy. Under certain conditions, it can function as a corrective force, signaling failures of responsiveness and compelling elites to confront public demands they have too long ignored.
This argument runs directly through the spirit of the interview’s headline: “Populism Is Democracy’s Way of the People Telling Elites to ‘Listen Harder’.” Rather than treating populism as inherently pathological, Professor Culpepper urges a more discriminating view. In his recent Journal of Democracy article, “When Populism Can Be Good,” co-authored with Taeku Lee, he distinguishes between two broad dimensions of anti-elite sentiment: one rooted in political failure, the other in economic unfairness. For Professor Culpepper, this distinction is decisive. A populism centered on political failure—marked by distrust in elections, media, and institutions—can become corrosive to pluralism. By contrast, populist energies organized around economic unfairness may serve as a democratizing counterweight to entrenched power. As he puts it, “there are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness.”
The interview shows that this concern with responsiveness is inseparable from Professor Culpepper’s broader work on corporate scandal, media narratives, and regulatory change. Across cases ranging from the Beef Trust and The Jungle to Cambridge Analytica, AI regulation, and Big Tech, he explores how moments of public outrage can disrupt what he famously described as “quiet politics”—those domains in which organized business interests dominate because public attention is weak. Scandals, in his account, operate like “earthquakes”: they release latent pressure, render previously obscure issues politically salient, and sometimes create openings for institutional reform. Yet these openings do not arise automatically. They depend on policy entrepreneurs, compelling narratives of blame, and political actors capable of translating outrage into durable regulation.
What emerges from this conversation is a deeply textured account of the ambivalence of populism in contemporary democracy. Professor Culpepper does not romanticize anti-elite anger; he repeatedly underscores the dangers of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. Still, he insists that democratic theory must take seriously the possibility that public outrage, when directed at economic concentration and political unresponsiveness, can help rebalance distorted systems of power. The key question, as he suggests, is not whether populism exists, but which grievances it channels and toward what ends. In that sense, this interview is both an analysis of populism and a meditation on democracy’s capacity for self-correction.
Here is the edited version of our interview with Professor Pepper Culpepper, revised slightly to improve clarity and flow.
When Anti-Elitism Strengthens Rather Than Undermines Democracy
Professor Culpepper, welcome. Let me begin with a broader conceptual question: In “When Populism Can Be Good,” you distinguish between a pluralism-threatening populism and a corrective, anti-elite populism. Under what institutional, discursive, and socio-economic conditions does the latter emerge as a democratizing force rather than degenerating into illiberal majoritarianism?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: Thanks for that question. It’s a big one, so let me try to unpack it. In our recent article in the Journal of Democracy, “When Populism Can Be Good,” my co-author, Taeku Lee, and I examine the different components that sit within populism. We distinguish between two broad dimensions, which we can discuss further: one focused on political failure and the other on economic unfairness. We ask whether it is really true, as many people—especially elites like us—tend to assume, that populism is necessarily bad for democracy.
In our view, a form of populism that undermines pluralism is indeed harmful to democracy. By pluralism, I mean a community composed of multiple members coming from different backgrounds, with different allegiances—religious, racial, or political. Anything that weakens our willingness to work together as a community is detrimental to democratic life. We find that such dynamics are more closely associated with political failure than with economic unfairness, though I can say more about that later.
Your question, then, is about the conditions under which one dimension comes to dominate over the other. I think the answer is ultimately contingent, and it depends on what we might call the bulk of latent public opinion—what people are really concerned about. That is one side of the equation. The other concerns what political parties choose to offer within the system in response. Do they mobilize around political failure, which is associated with many of the elements that undermine pluralism, or around economic unfairness, which is not associated with those same dynamics?
Which Grievances Make Populism More Democratic?
Your framework identifies “political failure” and “economic unfairness” as distinct but overlapping sources of anti-elite mobilization. How do these dimensions interact in shaping the trajectory of populist politics, and which is more conducive to democracy-enhancing outcomes?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: These tendencies can coexist in a single person’s mind, but what we do is use factor analysis from 36,000 interviews across four countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—to understand which types of views cluster more closely together.
On the political failure side, these are people who tend to agree with statements such as: elections don’t matter; you can’t trust what you read in the mainstream media; and conspiracy-type views, such as the idea that a small group of people run the world. All of these reflect perceived failings of political institutions, suggesting that the game is politically rigged.
On the other side is the economic unfairness dimension, which is much more associated with the notion that the economic system is rigged—that elites have succeeded only because of this system and that they cannot understand the problems faced by ordinary people.
Thus, these two dimensions capture two aspects of failure: one concerns the responsiveness of the political system, and the other concerns the economic system within which it is embedded. I think it is important to step back and consider how the two relate, which is your question. That relationship is shaped by where we are structurally within capitalism. We are currently in a period marked by the enormous concentration of very large companies—particularly, though not exclusively, in the tech sector—and these firms shape many of the conditions of our lives.
Historically, this period resembles the era leading up to 1900, when there was a strong populist movement in the United States, associated with William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech. That movement, like populist movements today, was driven by grievances against urban elites and the sense that ordinary people were being taken advantage of. At its core, populism is a moralized claim about the divide between the common person and the elite.
That earlier phase gave way to the Progressive movement, a period in which both Democrats and Republicans agreed that large trusts—big steel, big oil, and big finance—had grown too powerful and needed to be brought back under control. When these two dimensions come together, they can become powerful forces. In particular, the economic unfairness dimension can generate a strong pushback against large corporations, and we think—both in this article and in our book—that there are good reasons to expect this dynamic to shape developments in the years ahead.
How Episodic Shocks Recalibrate Accountability
In “Billionaire Backlash,” you conceptualize corporate scandals as focusing events that can disrupt entrenched policy equilibria. How do such episodic shocks compare to longer-term populist mobilizations in their capacity to recalibrate democratic accountability?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: Think of them a little bit like earthquakes. They release pressure—pressure that has built up in public opinion. If I can go back for a moment to the Progressive Era in the United States, there was one particular trust—the Beef Trust, that is, the meatpackers—that dominated American food production. Its dominance was such that around 200 laws were proposed between 1880 and 1900 to improve food hygiene, largely because Europeans would not even import American meat due to its poor sanitary conditions. All of those laws failed. That is the kind of blocked politics we often see today, where it is very difficult to get anything through Congress or many parliaments.
What changed in 1906 was the emergence of a corporate scandal with the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. This released latent public opinion. It was, as you suggest, an episodic shock—a one-time disruption—but it triggered institutional change. It led to the creation of the American Food and Drug Administration, and American food was thereafter regulated. This did not eliminate business power; industry remained strong, and food producers continued to wield influence. But it did establish a regulatory framework within which those interests had to operate. In that sense, episodic shocks can generate institutional changes that constrain actors who previously enjoyed much greater freedom.
To return to your question, the recalibration of democratic accountability occurs when governments actually deliver what people want. Colleagues such as Steve Macedo and Jenny Mansbridge have argued that populism is democracy’s way of the people telling elites to “listen harder.” We believe that is the moment we are in. There are, of course, many negative aspects of populism, but one positive dimension is its potential to enhance responsiveness. We have witnessed a period in which corporate power has grown while governments have remained strikingly unresponsive. Large majorities favor some form of AI regulation, yet meaningful regulation has not emerged.
Democratic accountability, then, requires institutions that respond to what citizens actually want, rather than primarily to what business interests demand. In this sense, accountability often advances through episodic shocks; it rarely emerges through other mechanisms.
Blame, Narrative, and the Politics of Reform
Building on your work on media effects, how do framing, narrative construction, and attribution of responsibility mediate the translation of scandal-driven outrage into sustained regulatory change rather than transient symbolic responses?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: That ultimately depends, as we discuss at length in the book, on the emergence of policy entrepreneurs. You are right that framing and narrative construction are key to how we interpret what a scandal means, and there is always an effort to advance competing interpretations when a scandal emerges, including over who is responsible. But effective scandals tend to attribute blame quite efficiently. A scandal is corporate malfeasance that is made public and becomes salient; that is what a scandal is, by definition.
So, blame typically involves something going wrong within the corporate system, brought into the public eye by the malfeasance, and people respond by saying, “I always thought that was going on.” That generates public outrage, but outrage alone does not produce legislation. If laws are to be passed, you need actors who have been working for a long time to advance reform.
These policy entrepreneurs are, in a sense, the central figures of our book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy, because they are the ones—whether inside the political system, like the EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, or outside it, like the Austrian activist Max Schrems or the California property developer Alastair McTaggart—who use moments of corporate scandal to push for concrete change. They step in and say, “Here is what needs to happen, and the government must respond.” When a compelling narrative is already in place and public demand is high, that is when politicians begin to pay attention.
Scandals and the Limits of Business Power
To what extent can scandal-induced public attention overcome the structural advantages of “quiet politics,” or are these moments better understood as temporary punctuations within a broader equilibrium of business dominance?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: I think they are the latter. They are best understood as temporary punctuations within a broader equilibrium of business dominance. But that is the nature of capitalism. Democracy rests on the idea that each person of electoral age is equally valuable—one person, one vote. That is not how resources are allocated in capitalism. Capitalism allocates resources, often quite unequally, in order to maximize efficiency. This produces a strong concentration of financial resources, which can then be translated into political resources. So, capitalism is always going to be unbalanced in favor of business. I have spent my whole career writing about that, and I feel quite comfortable saying it. But the imbalance can take different forms and degrees.
What we see in corporate scandals is a partial redressing of that imbalance. These moments can constrain the ability of business interests to dominate by making certain issues highly salient issues on which the public is watching closely and pressing politicians to deliver outcomes that impose some limits on business power.
You can see this in the kinds of cases we study, often involving quite complex issues such as privacy regulation or financial regulation. Scandals like Cambridge Analytica or Goldman Sachs bring these otherwise abstruse issues into public view. Once they become salient, people demand a response, and governments often provide one. That institutional change then shifts the balance of power in politics, even if only partially.
We are not suggesting that this leads to a fully equal democracy in which everyone has the same level of influence. Large businesses will always remain powerful, and there is a certain legitimacy to that, since they are often engines of economic growth, which is itself important for democracy. But the current distribution of power—so heavily concentrated in the hands of a small number of controlling owners—is not what many people want. What we find is that scandals can play a meaningful role in redressing that imbalance.
Affect, Elections, and Democratic Pushback
Your research highlights the role of affect—particularly anger—in catalyzing support for regulation. How can democratic systems channel such emotions into constructive policy change without amplifying the risks of polarization, scapegoating, or demagogic capture?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: We are already living in an age of polarization, scapegoating, and demagogic capture. So, the question is not simply how to worry about those risks, but how to overcome them. Anger that goes unaddressed leads precisely to the outcomes we are seeing. But anger, when properly channeled—through political parties that seek to respond to it and articulate a democratic program—is how these dynamics can be pushed back.
I do not need to explain this, especially in light of the recent Hungarian election, where a party like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, which has been in power for a long time and has served as a leading example of nationalist populism, faced significant pressure. You even had figures like J.D. Vance attempting to support Orbán’s government as part of a broader alignment among populist right-wing governments globally—I use the word “axis” advisedly.
And yet, despite gerrymandering and the structural advantages embedded in the system—despite the fact that Orbán’s allies control many of the largest industries—you still see moments of public anger and surges of popular support that can operate powerfully through democratic institutions. As long as elections continue to be held, leaders remain accountable to them.
Populism, Redistribution, and the Limits of State Trust
In your work on inequality narratives, framing the economy as “rigged” appears to shift redistributive preferences. How does this narrative intersect with populist discourse across the ideological spectrum, and where do its democratizing potentials encounter normative or institutional limits?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: Let me say a bit about that article, since it may not be familiar to all your readers. We conducted a study in which we exposed people in various countries to a “rigged system” narrative. We essentially presented the same story about inequality in each country, framing it as a rigged system, based on a paper by Joseph Stiglitz, but substituting country-specific statistics. So, people were reading about their own country, its level of inequality, and the idea that the system was rigged.
In every country we studied, this led to a shift in opinion in favor of redistribution—except in the United States. There, we did not observe the same shift. People appeared to accept that the system was indeed rigged when they read the article, but they did not trust the state to carry out redistribution.
This suggests that, in most contexts, populist discourse around redistribution can be quite effective in moving public opinion toward greater support for redistribution. But in the United States, there is such deep skepticism about the state that this effect is much more limited.
When thinking about the normative or institutional limits, I would say they are largely shaped by political context—by the extent to which people have developed views about the state’s capacity to bring about change, and about what they perceive to be the main threats within the system. In the United States, many people tend to see government primarily as a source of red tape and bureaucracy, rather than as an instrument for promoting equality or reducing inequality of opportunity. Most people, in fact, are uncomfortable with inequality of opportunity, even if they do not expect full equality of outcomes.
So, when we talk about normative or institutional limits, we are really referring to the political demands that exist within each country. These are legitimately and democratically contested, and they vary across national contexts.
Why Some Scandals Escape Partisan Filters
How does partisan polarization reshape the effects of corporate scandals, particularly in fragmented media environments where competing narratives assign blame in divergent ways and potentially blunt consensus for reform?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: Yes, that is really the core argument of our book on corporate scandals. Corporate scandals are among the few types of scandals that can sometimes escape this polarization effect—though not always. They can escape it because partisan scandals—most political scandals you are familiar with—do not resonate equally across the political spectrum. People interpret them through partisan lenses. If a scandal involves a party on the left, those on the left tend to defend the individual involved, while those on the right attack them, and vice versa.
That is not typically the case with corporate scandals. Here, you have CEOs, senior executives, or controlling shareholders engaging in behavior that people across the political spectrum may not find surprising but still find outrageous. Because of this, corporate scandals can sometimes cut across partisan divides and break through polarization.
However, this does not always hold. It can break down when the issue at stake in a corporate scandal has already become politically contested and polarized. We see this clearly in the case of climate change in the United States. In the early 1990s, climate change was among the least polarized issues, with Republicans and Democrats holding broadly similar views. By 2015 and beyond, it had become one of the most polarized issues. As a result, scandals involving companies like ExxonMobil elicit very different responses from Republicans and Democrats.
Another situation in which the effect breaks down is when a corporate leader is personally politically polarizing. Take the example of Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. He was widely seen as a major Democratic donor, even though he also contributed to Republicans in an effort to influence policy. The political left interpreted the FTX scandal as evidence of the need for stronger regulation, while the right framed it as a case of moral hypocrisy and individual wrongdoing—something akin to a “bad apple” problem, often with the added emphasis that he was a Democratic donor.
This divergence in interpretation has shaped how the American public now views cryptocurrency regulation, producing a clear partisan divide—even though most people have only a limited understanding of how cryptocurrency works. Once polarization becomes embedded in an issue, corporate scandals have a much harder time generating broad-based resonance.
Personalizing Power, Mobilizing Outrage
Your analysis of financial regulation suggests that personalization of blame can intensify public engagement. To what extent is such personalization a necessary heuristic for mobilization, and to what extent does it obscure deeper structural dynamics of capitalist power?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: When I give presentations about the book, I sometimes have very wealthy people in the audience—occasional centimillionaires, if not billionaires. Their reaction is often: I understand what you are saying about large companies, but what is wrong with billionaires? What have they ever done? They have simply been very successful. Why should we be angry about them?
I do not take a normative position on that, but I can say that people do take a view. Public opinion, broadly speaking, does not clearly distinguish between the actions of large corporations and those of billionaires. Billionaires provide easily recognizable faces for what are otherwise more complex and abstract dynamics—what you refer to as the structural dynamics of capitalism.
In that sense, billionaires put a face on what people perceive as problematic or unreasonable in corporate behavior. Take, for example, debates about AI firms building data centers without local approval, even when such projects may raise local energy prices. That is a complicated political issue. But if you place figures like Sam Altman, the head of a major AI company, in front of the public, people recognize him, and he becomes a focal point. Similarly, Elon Musk—who spans AI and the broader tech sector through Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI—serves as a highly visible figure around whom public attention can coalesce.
So, billionaires, as individuals, help make these dynamics more intelligible. If the goal is to mobilize people politically, discussing structural dynamics may work well in a graduate seminar or a policy school like the one where I teach. But in broader political life, recognizable individuals make those dynamics more concrete and significantly increase public engagement.
Big Tech, Public Resentment, and Regulatory Demand
In an era marked by the concentration of power in platform capitalism and Big Tech, do corporate scandals retain their capacity to generate broad reform coalitions, or are we witnessing the limits of scandal-driven accountability in highly networked economies?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: Well, we will see. The argument of our book is that what people respond to is the reality of their daily lives. That is what latent opinion is all about. It suggests that people feel constrained by the fact that corporations are making choices that are not democratically accountable.
So, when we send rockets into space, we tend to cheer the government—for example, NASA in the United States, which has recently sent a rocket around the moon. But in reality, it is a private company, SpaceX, that is doing much of the production and effectively running large parts of the space program. Private companies are increasingly performing roles that governments used to play.
As a result, people have growing resentment toward large corporations that, once they reach monopoly positions—whether it is Amazon or Facebook—can engage in what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” making people’s lives worse while extracting monopoly rents. This is a major source of public concern.
So, when you ask whether we have reached the limits of scandal-driven politics, I would say that scandal-driven politics works particularly well when the structural conditions of capitalism make people especially sensitive to the inability of politics to restrain large companies. These firms are responsible for much of the economic growth, while many others do not benefit in the same way. This creates a strong demand for regulatory constraints, because people do not necessarily believe that these companies act in the public interest—they act in their own private interest, which is what private companies are designed to do.
There is, in other words, a growing disjuncture between the power of these companies and the degree to which they are held accountable by the political system. For that reason, I do not think scandal-driven politics will diminish; if anything, it is likely to intensify over time.
Cambridge Analytica and Divergent Regulatory Paths
How do focusing events such as transnational scandals—Cambridge Analytica being a paradigmatic example—travel across jurisdictions, and under what conditions do they produce convergent versus divergent regulatory responses?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: To answer this question, I want to return to my concept of the policy entrepreneur. What happened with Cambridge Analytica was that it was revealed that the data of nearly 90 million Facebook users, many of them in the United States, had been taken by this political consulting firm. Cambridge Analytica claimed to use these data to run micro-targeted advertisements, suggesting that it could influence outcomes such as the Brexit referendum and the 2016 Clinton–Trump election. There is no evidence that Cambridge Analytica actually affected electoral outcomes, but it is certainly true that the 2018 revelations by The Guardian and The New York Times made the issue of privacy enormously salient and severely damaged Facebook’s reputation—something from which Facebook, now Meta, has never fully recovered. Indeed, Facebook remains one of the most distrusted institutions in public opinion as a result of this episode.
In terms of divergent regulatory responses, the European Union had already passed privacy regulation in the form of the GDPR—the General Data Protection Regulation—building on earlier controversies such as the PRISM scandal, in which major tech companies were found to be cooperating with intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ. In Europe, policymakers such as Margrethe Vestager were able to build on the public outrage generated by Cambridge Analytica to advance further regulation, including the Digital Markets Act in competition policy and the Digital Services Act in online safety, thereby strengthening the regulatory framework governing Big Tech.
In the United States, by contrast, national-level politics proved highly constrained. Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress, where both Democrats and Republicans criticized him following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. However, a telling moment occurred when Senator Orrin G. Hatch asked Zuckerberg how Facebook made money without charging users, to which Zuckerberg replied, “Senator, we sell ads.” That exchange illustrated a broader problem: many policymakers lacked a clear understanding of the digital economy, which limited their capacity to impose effective regulation.
As a result, while federal action stalled, regulatory innovation emerged at the state level. In California, the property developer Alastair McTaggart seized on the surge in public concern following Cambridge Analytica and pushed for a referendum to introduce strong privacy protections, comparable in some respects to the GDPR. Faced with this prospect, tech companies negotiated a legislative compromise, resulting in a new law passed in 2018. When subsequent amendments threatened to weaken it, McTaggart mobilized public opinion again and successfully backed another referendum in 2020, which passed with a clear majority and included provisions preventing the law from being diluted.
What we see, then, is that different jurisdictions respond to transnational scandals in distinct ways, depending on their institutional contexts and prior regulatory trajectories. In California, new privacy regulation emerged where none had existed before; in the European Union, existing regulatory frameworks were deepened and expanded. In both cases, however, the transnational shock of the Cambridge Analytica scandal prompted significant regulatory responses.
When Populism Corrects and When It Corrodes
If certain forms of populist mobilization can enhance democratic accountability, what distinguishes “bounded” or policy-focused anti-elitism from system-level populism that ultimately erodes liberal democratic institutions?
Professor Pepper Culpepper: I am not sure that system-level populism necessarily erodes liberal democratic institutions. We, in the policy elite tend to assume that populism involves people espousing simple solutions that are unlikely to work, and therefore not being serious. But what populism is doing at a systemic level is expressing something deeper. Policy-focused anti-elitism is not really the distinction we should be making. Rather, the key question is which part of the system people are upset about. Do they focus on political failure, or on economic unfairness? And I think there are people who focus on both.
These are not simply policy-driven positions. They reflect deeper forms of public dissatisfaction with what the system is delivering. It is a question of public outrage, and whether that outrage is channeled along the lines of political failure or along the lines of economic unfairness. I think that this distinction ultimately shapes whether populism acts as a constructive rebalancer of democracy or as a force that undermines it.
