P D Culpepper
Biographic Data
| ID | 2076286 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P D Culpepper |
| GIVEN NAMES | P D |
| FAMILY NAME | Culpepper |
| SIGNATURE | CULPEPPER P D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6227-0813 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 651 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
In the Metaverse, Politicians Can Hear You Scream: Corporate Scandals, Big Tech Regulation, and the Microfoundations of Focusing Events
Around the world, the growing power of giant technology firms has outpaced regulatory oversight, raising urgent questions about how public opinion can be mobilized in support of meaningful reform. When do broad coalitions emerge in support of stronger regulation? This study investigates corporate scandals as windows of opportunity—focusing events—that can galvanize public support for new regulations and amplify issue salience. To assess this poss…
Media effects revisited: Corporate scandals, partisan narratives, and attitudes toward cryptocurrency regulation
This article advances the literature on media effects by examining how contrasting partisan narratives influence support for regulation after a real-world corporate scandal. Using both multi-wave observational and randomized experimental data, we show that self-selected media exposure and experimentally assigned information shape public opinion in distinct ways. While scandals are narratives of regulatory failure, partisan media environments diff…
The Economy is Rigged: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries
Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect …
Banklash: How Media Coverage of Bank Scandals Moves Mass Preferences on Financial Regulation
Financial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regulation. Drawing from the literatures on media influence and public opinion, we argue that news coverage of bank scandals should increase voters’ appetit…
The art of the shitty deal: Media frames and public opinion on financial regulation in the United States
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 is the most comprehensive reform of American finance since the Great Depression and an ideal case to study how public opinion can counter the political power of finance. This article shows how pivotal congressional hearings created a clear story line for American media, one built around the way in which the investment bank Goldman Sachs made money during the crisis. We demonstrate that Goldman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein be…
Computational Identification of Media Frames: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities
With the availability of large volumes of electronic communications data and the increasing sophistication of computational techniques, the development of automated approaches for different kinds of framing analysis is an important goal of researchers. There is as yet no standard method for the "unsupervised" inductive identification of frames based upon the content of articles. Three groups of core approaches underlie a wide range of work in thi…
Media frames, partisan identification and the Australian banking scandal
In 2017 the Australian government appointed a Royal Commission of inquiry into malfeasance in the banking sector. This article reports findings from a 2018 survey on attitudes to financial regulation and a survey experiment testing different media treatments. Attitudes on financial regulation are distinct from left-right positions on redistributive issues; we find no significant relationship between partisan identification and preferences for fin…
Quiet Politics in Tumultuous Times: Business Power, Populism, and Democracy
This article comments on a special issue of Politics & Society that examines 'quiet politics' and the power of business in an era of 'noisy politics.' The scholarship brought together in the issue shows that the world of business has indeed changed in the decade since Quiet Politics and Business Power was published, but also that quiet politics as a mode of low-salience interest advocacy seems alive and well. Building on this research, the articl…
Are We All Amazon Primed? Consumers and the Politics of Platform Power
This article articulates a distinctive source of political influence of some technology firms, which we call platform power. Platform power inheres in companies of economic scale that provide the terms of access through which large numbers of consumers access goods, services, and information. Firms with platform power benefit from a deference from policymakers, but this deference is not primarily a function of direct influence through lobbying or…
Capitalism, Institutions, and Power in the Study of Business
This chapter explores the contributions of historical institutionalist scholarship to understanding preference formation in business. It critiques the analytical drift of the literature away from some conceptual sites of essential political action in democratic capitalism: issues of power, common trends across capitalist countries, and the role of voters in structuring the character of political conflict among interest groups and political partie…
Structural power and political science in the post-crisis era
This essay highlights productive ways in which scholars have reanimated the concept of structural power to explain puzzles in international and comparative politics. Past comparative scholarship stressed the dependence of the state on holders of capital, but it struggled to reconcile this supposed dependence with the frequent losses of business in political battles. International relation (IR) scholars were attentive to the power of large states,…
The Political Economy of Unmediated Democracy: Italian Austerity under Mario Monti
Published online: 14 August 2014
Why don't governments need trade unions anymore? The death of social pacts in Ireland and Italy
First published online : February 2, 2014
Structural Power and Bank Bailouts in the United Kingdom and the United States
The 2008 bailout is often taken as evidence of the domination of the US political system by large financial institutions. In fact, the bailout demonstrated the vulnerability of US banks to government pressure. Large banks in the United States could not defy regulators, because their future income depended on the US market. In Britain, by contrast, one bank succeeded in scuttling the preferred governmental solution of an industry-wide recapitaliza…
Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan
Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs and the unraveling of…
Institutions and Collective Actors in the Provision of Training: Historical and Cross-National Comparisons
This chapter considers contributions from the political science literature to understanding the causes and consequences of cross-national diversity in training regimes across the most developed democracies. The recent surge of interest by political scientists in skills has developed as an offshoot of debates over distinctive varieties of capitalism. Although economists are mostly interested in the efficiency effects of different skill formation s…
Capitalism, Coordination, and Economic Change: The French Political Economy since 1985
France is no longer a statist political economy; but what sort of political economy is it? In this chapter I show how the major institutions of the French economy have changed since 1985 and consider the character of the current political economy in light of the key actors in this process of change. Many scholars argue that the limits of statism were abundantly clear after the failure of François Mitterrand’s experiment with “Keynesianism in one …
Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity
Journal Article Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity Get access Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity, by Masahiko Aoki, Gregory Jackson and Hideaki Miyajima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 480 pp., $49.95 (paperback ISBN 0-19-928452-0), $99.00 (hardcover ISBN 0-19-928451-2) Pepper D. CULPEPPER Pepper D. CULPEPPER Harvard Kennedy School Search for other…
Europe in Search of Political Order
The Politics of Common Knowledge: Ideas and Institutional Change in Wage Bargaining
Domestic economic institutions change through processes of conflict and bargaining. Why do the strongest groups in such conflicts ever change their minds about the acceptability of institutional arrangements they once opposed? Drawing on the cases of Ireland in 1986–87 and Italy in 1989–93, this article demonstrates how the process of common knowledge creation between employers and unions changed the course of negotiations over national wage barg…
Lectures critiques
La diversité des trois regards critiques offerts sur notre ouvrage reflète la diversité discipli-naire que nous avons voulue à l’origine de ce projet, visant à mobiliser les sciences sociales dans leur diversité (économie politique, histoire, sociologie, science politique...) pour comprendre la diversité des mutations économiques, sociales et politiques connues par la France au cours des 25 dernières années. Qu’est-il advenu du dirigisme économiq…
Note From the Review Editor
Eppure, non si muove: Legal change, institutional stability and Italian corporate governance
Prevailing theories in political economy hold that a coalition or political party, acting through parliament, can break down institutions of stable shareholding. In spite of extremely favourable conditions in the late 1990s – the election and durable rule of a leftist government supported by a transparency coalition, a bureaucratic elite that favoured institutional change, and substantial state shareholdings which the government could privatise i…
Small States and Skill Specificity: Austria, Switzerland, and Interemployer Cleavages in Coordinated Capitalism
The varieties of capitalism literature has put skill systems at the center of comparative politics. Yet its claims about skill specificity are driven by two large coordinated economies, Germany and Japan. This article examines political change of skills in two small coordinated economies. Switzerland has expanded its general skills orientation, whereas Austria retains a highly specific skills system. The cause of this divergence is the different …
Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics and Institutional Change and Globalization
Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics. By Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 240p. $17.95. Institutional Change and Globalization. By John L. Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 264p. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. Joined by their pursuit of the causal mechanisms that drive institutional and organizational change, these authors provide a window on the pro…
Structural Power and Bank Bailouts in the United Kingdom and the United States
The 2008 bailout is often taken as evidence of the domination of the US political system by large financial institutions. In fact, the bailout demonstrated the vulnerability of US banks to government pressure. Large banks in the United States could not defy regulators, because their future income depended on the US market. In Britain, by contrast, one bank succeeded in scuttling the preferred governmental solution of an industry-wide recapitaliza…
Are We All Amazon Primed? Consumers and the Politics of Platform Power
This article articulates a distinctive source of political influence of some technology firms, which we call platform power. Platform power inheres in companies of economic scale that provide the terms of access through which large numbers of consumers access goods, services, and information. Firms with platform power benefit from a deference from policymakers, but this deference is not primarily a function of direct influence through lobbying or…
Institutional Change in Contemporary Capitalism: Coordinated Financial Systems since 1990
What happens when the unstoppable force of liberalization collides with the immovable object of national financial institutions in the advanced industrial democracies? To answer this question and evaluate alternative mechanisms to explain institutional change, this article examines the cases of the three large European economies with concentrated share ownership—France, Germany, and Italy. In the formal legal mechanism, interest coalitions adopt …
The Politics of Common Knowledge: Ideas and Institutional Change in Wage Bargaining
Domestic economic institutions change through processes of conflict and bargaining. Why do the strongest groups in such conflicts ever change their minds about the acceptability of institutional arrangements they once opposed? Drawing on the cases of Ireland in 1986–87 and Italy in 1989–93, this article demonstrates how the process of common knowledge creation between employers and unions changed the course of negotiations over national wage barg…
Why don't governments need trade unions anymore? The death of social pacts in Ireland and Italy
First published online : February 2, 2014
Small States and Skill Specificity: Austria, Switzerland, and Interemployer Cleavages in Coordinated Capitalism
The varieties of capitalism literature has put skill systems at the center of comparative politics. Yet its claims about skill specificity are driven by two large coordinated economies, Germany and Japan. This article examines political change of skills in two small coordinated economies. Switzerland has expanded its general skills orientation, whereas Austria retains a highly specific skills system. The cause of this divergence is the different …
Powering, puzzling, and 'pacting: The Informational Logic of Negotiated Reforms
Across Europe, contemporary negotiated reforms of economic and social policy are increasingly characterized by a logic of information rather than a logic of exchange. Unlike in neo-corporatist bargaining over incomes policies, states negotiate with the social partners not primarily to secure their acquiescence, but instead to enlist their active assistance in designing and mobilizing support for substantial reforms of public policy. State policy-…
Creating Cooperation: How States Develop Human Capital in Europe
In Creating Cooperation , Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills, but uncertainty and mutual distrust among companies doom many policy initiatives to failure. Higher skills benefit society as a whole, so national governments want to foster them. However, business…
The Political Economy of Unmediated Democracy: Italian Austerity under Mario Monti
Published online: 14 August 2014
Computational Identification of Media Frames: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities
With the availability of large volumes of electronic communications data and the increasing sophistication of computational techniques, the development of automated approaches for different kinds of framing analysis is an important goal of researchers. There is as yet no standard method for the "unsupervised" inductive identification of frames based upon the content of articles. Three groups of core approaches underlie a wide range of work in thi…
Quiet Politics in Tumultuous Times: Business Power, Populism, and Democracy
This article comments on a special issue of Politics & Society that examines 'quiet politics' and the power of business in an era of 'noisy politics.' The scholarship brought together in the issue shows that the world of business has indeed changed in the decade since Quiet Politics and Business Power was published, but also that quiet politics as a mode of low-salience interest advocacy seems alive and well. Building on this research, the articl…
Eppure, non si muove: Legal change, institutional stability and Italian corporate governance
Prevailing theories in political economy hold that a coalition or political party, acting through parliament, can break down institutions of stable shareholding. In spite of extremely favourable conditions in the late 1990s – the election and durable rule of a leftist government supported by a transparency coalition, a bureaucratic elite that favoured institutional change, and substantial state shareholdings which the government could privatise i…
Organisational competition and the neo‐corporatist fallacy in French agriculture
This article challenges the neo‐corporatist paradigm's explanation of agricultural interest group politics in France. It offers an alternative model that can better comprehend the relevant attributes of this interest group system, a system based on the muffled competition among groups with different policy preferences, all of which participate in a collaborative arrangement with the state. Empirical verification is drawn from the experiences of t…
Can the State Create Cooperation: Problems of Reforming the Labor Supply in France
Governments in the advanced industrial countries increasingly rely on supply-side reforms to intervene in the economy. This article examines one such reform, that of vocational education and training in France, whose successful implementation required that private actors cooperate not with the state, but with each other. As demonstrated through an empirical analysis of two employment zones, theories of institutional design that underscore the nec…
Models of Capitalism: Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era
Europe in Search of Political Order
Banklash: How Media Coverage of Bank Scandals Moves Mass Preferences on Financial Regulation
Financial regulation is often adopted in the wake of scandals and crises. Yet political science has little to say about the political effects of corporate scandals. We break that silence, asking whether exposure to news coverage of bank scandals changes the preferences of voters for financial regulation. Drawing from the literatures on media influence and public opinion, we argue that news coverage of bank scandals should increase voters’ appetit…
The art of the shitty deal: Media frames and public opinion on financial regulation in the United States
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 is the most comprehensive reform of American finance since the Great Depression and an ideal case to study how public opinion can counter the political power of finance. This article shows how pivotal congressional hearings created a clear story line for American media, one built around the way in which the investment bank Goldman Sachs made money during the crisis. We demonstrate that Goldman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein be…
The Economy is Rigged: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries
Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect …
Media frames, partisan identification and the Australian banking scandal
In 2017 the Australian government appointed a Royal Commission of inquiry into malfeasance in the banking sector. This article reports findings from a 2018 survey on attitudes to financial regulation and a survey experiment testing different media treatments. Attitudes on financial regulation are distinct from left-right positions on redistributive issues; we find no significant relationship between partisan identification and preferences for fin…
Organisational competition and the neo‐corporatist fallacy in French agriculture
This article challenges the neo‐corporatist paradigm's explanation of agricultural interest group politics in France. It offers an alternative model that can better comprehend the relevant attributes of this interest group system, a system based on the muffled competition among groups with different policy preferences, all of which participate in a collaborative arrangement with the state. Empirical verification is drawn from the experiences of t…
Introduction: Still a Model for the Industrialized Countries?
Chapter 7: Individual Choice, Collective Action, and the Problem of Training Reform: Insights from France and Eastern Germany
Individual Choice, Collective Action, and the Problem of Training Reform: Insights from France and Eastern Germany
The future of the high-skill equilibrium in Germany
Is the celebrated German skills system in peril? Western German employers have cut apprenticeship places since the 1980s, while the institutional supports of the "high-skill equilibrium" (HSE) analysed by Finegold and Soskice (1988) are threatened: the globalization of equity markets menaces the 'patient capital' on which German companies depend; lean production techniques have rendered strategies of incremental innovation vulnerable on internati…
Models of Capitalism: Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era
Can the State Create Cooperation: Problems of Reforming the Labor Supply in France
Governments in the advanced industrial countries increasingly rely on supply-side reforms to intervene in the economy. This article examines one such reform, that of vocational education and training in France, whose successful implementation required that private actors cooperate not with the state, but with each other. As demonstrated through an empirical analysis of two employment zones, theories of institutional design that underscore the nec…
Employers, Public Policy, and the Politics of Decentralized Cooperation in Germany and France
Reforms of public policy often require governments to convince private actors to cooperate with each other. Through a comparison of vocational training reforms undertaken in France and Germany, this chapter demonstrates the conditions under which governments can succeed in such an economic reform. Lacking the information necessary to design policies that can solve these problems of coordination, governments must work with private associations tha…
Associations and Non-Market Coordination in Banking: France and Eastern Germany Compared
Research on employer coordination in the advanced capitalist countries has focused almost exclusively on the manufacturing sector, even though the service sector is responsible for most employment growth. This article considers organizational change in the service sector, comparing structurally similar networks of public savings banks in France and eastern Germany. It finds that the capacities of peak associations to circulate information widely …
Creating Cooperation: How States Develop Human Capital in Europe
In Creating Cooperation , Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills, but uncertainty and mutual distrust among companies doom many policy initiatives to failure. Higher skills benefit society as a whole, so national governments want to foster them. However, business…
Powering, puzzling, and 'pacting: The Informational Logic of Negotiated Reforms
Across Europe, contemporary negotiated reforms of economic and social policy are increasingly characterized by a logic of information rather than a logic of exchange. Unlike in neo-corporatist bargaining over incomes policies, states negotiate with the social partners not primarily to secure their acquiescence, but instead to enlist their active assistance in designing and mobilizing support for substantial reforms of public policy. State policy-…
Institutional Change in Contemporary Capitalism: Coordinated Financial Systems since 1990
What happens when the unstoppable force of liberalization collides with the immovable object of national financial institutions in the advanced industrial democracies? To answer this question and evaluate alternative mechanisms to explain institutional change, this article examines the cases of the three large European economies with concentrated share ownership—France, Germany, and Italy. In the formal legal mechanism, interest coalitions adopt …
Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics and Institutional Change and Globalization
Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics. By Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 240p. $17.95. Institutional Change and Globalization. By John L. Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 264p. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. Joined by their pursuit of the causal mechanisms that drive institutional and organizational change, these authors provide a window on the pro…
Lectures critiques
La diversité des trois regards critiques offerts sur notre ouvrage reflète la diversité discipli-naire que nous avons voulue à l’origine de ce projet, visant à mobiliser les sciences sociales dans leur diversité (économie politique, histoire, sociologie, science politique...) pour comprendre la diversité des mutations économiques, sociales et politiques connues par la France au cours des 25 dernières années. Qu’est-il advenu du dirigisme économiq…
Note From the Review Editor
Eppure, non si muove: Legal change, institutional stability and Italian corporate governance
Prevailing theories in political economy hold that a coalition or political party, acting through parliament, can break down institutions of stable shareholding. In spite of extremely favourable conditions in the late 1990s – the election and durable rule of a leftist government supported by a transparency coalition, a bureaucratic elite that favoured institutional change, and substantial state shareholdings which the government could privatise i…
Small States and Skill Specificity: Austria, Switzerland, and Interemployer Cleavages in Coordinated Capitalism
The varieties of capitalism literature has put skill systems at the center of comparative politics. Yet its claims about skill specificity are driven by two large coordinated economies, Germany and Japan. This article examines political change of skills in two small coordinated economies. Switzerland has expanded its general skills orientation, whereas Austria retains a highly specific skills system. The cause of this divergence is the different …
Institutions and Collective Actors in the Provision of Training: Historical and Cross-National Comparisons
This chapter considers contributions from the political science literature to understanding the causes and consequences of cross-national diversity in training regimes across the most developed democracies. The recent surge of interest by political scientists in skills has developed as an offshoot of debates over distinctive varieties of capitalism. Although economists are mostly interested in the efficiency effects of different skill formation s…
Capitalism, Coordination, and Economic Change: The French Political Economy since 1985
France is no longer a statist political economy; but what sort of political economy is it? In this chapter I show how the major institutions of the French economy have changed since 1985 and consider the character of the current political economy in light of the key actors in this process of change. Many scholars argue that the limits of statism were abundantly clear after the failure of François Mitterrand’s experiment with “Keynesianism in one …
Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity
Journal Article Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity Get access Corporate Governance in Japan: Institutional Change and Organizational Diversity, by Masahiko Aoki, Gregory Jackson and Hideaki Miyajima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 480 pp., $49.95 (paperback ISBN 0-19-928452-0), $99.00 (hardcover ISBN 0-19-928451-2) Pepper D. CULPEPPER Pepper D. CULPEPPER Harvard Kennedy School Search for other…
Europe in Search of Political Order
The Politics of Common Knowledge: Ideas and Institutional Change in Wage Bargaining
Domestic economic institutions change through processes of conflict and bargaining. Why do the strongest groups in such conflicts ever change their minds about the acceptability of institutional arrangements they once opposed? Drawing on the cases of Ireland in 1986–87 and Italy in 1989–93, this article demonstrates how the process of common knowledge creation between employers and unions changed the course of negotiations over national wage barg…
Quiet Politics and Business Power: Corporate Control in Europe and Japan
Does democracy control business, or does business control democracy? This study of how companies are bought and sold in four countries - France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands - explores this fundamental question. It does so by examining variation in the rules of corporate control - specifically, whether hostile takeovers are allowed. Takeovers have high political stakes: they result in corporate reorganizations, layoffs and the unraveling of…
The Political Economy of Unmediated Democracy: Italian Austerity under Mario Monti
Published online: 14 August 2014
Why don't governments need trade unions anymore? The death of social pacts in Ireland and Italy
First published online : February 2, 2014
Political science (32 works) · Politics (29 works) · Economics (26 works) · Political economy (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Business (11 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (10 works)