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Billionaire Backlash

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**This audiobook contains a bonus conversation between the authors**

The surprising story of how corporate scandals - from Enron to the Facebook privacy scandal - change the way the world works for the better.

Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee draw on a decade of research on policymaking and public opinion to show us how scandals can ignite a public with few political outlets for their discontent. Scandals don’t simply dominate news cycles: they can provoke us to demand better policy, spurring governments to adopt rules that protect us from massive corporations run amok.

Today it is giant companies, not governments, who run the world. They launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But around the globe, these corporate titans are facing increasing public hostility.

Tech giants are seen as promoting misinformation, undermining democracy and violating our privacy. Big banks, reeling since the financial crisis of 2008, continue to be racked with major scandals. Drawing on real-life examples such as the powdered milk scandal that rocked France, the VW scandal in Germany, the Goldman Sachs scandal in the United States, Cambridge Analytica in Britain and Samsung in South Korea - the authors show that these scandals are not just symptoms of a careless corporate elite, they are opportunities for real political change.

Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee reveal how the shared anger of citizens can be channelled into a backlash that has the potential to reinvigorate our failing democracies. One corporate scandal at a time.

Critics Review

At a time when democracies are in crisis and oligarchs are swaggering, Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee offer hope—and even better, hope that is backed by serious scholarship. In this captivating and insightful book, packed with rich insights ranging from the United States to the European Union to South Korea, two of our most respected political scientists powerfully show how corporate scandals can unite people to reclaim their democratic politics from the likes of Elon Musk.
Gary Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo
Few books are fun to read while suggesting credible ways of addressing urgent global problems: Billionaire Backlash does just that. It zeroes in on the Silicon Valley tycoons who have amassed unparallelled power over our lives. Through their opaque private companies, they now control essential public services. Through their newspapers and social media, they promote their interests and way-out opinions. Read it: this matters.
Paul Collier, author of The Future of Capitalism
In an age of democratic crisis, Billionaire Backlash shows us how corporate scandals offer unexpected opportunities for societal renewal – revealing how we as citizens can still assume the power to make the rules in modern democracies. Just read it – have fun, get wiser and get out there!
Margrethe Vestager, former EU Commissioner
Why is “good populism”—one that redirects public anger away from vulnerable minorities and toward the excessive greed and influence of big corporations—so difficult to achieve? Billionaire Backlash not only provides an answer but, crucially, explains how the obstacles to such good populism may be overcome. This book left me both better informed and more hopeful.
Steven Levitsky, author of How Democracies Die
In an age of increasing corruption, Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee provide a valuable explanation of when corporate scandals provoke public fury, and when instead they fade away.
Henry Farrell, author of Underground Empire

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