Pepper Culpepper

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.

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 twenty 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.

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.