Our public opinion inquiry has gathered what we believe is the most comprehensive cross-national information on attitudes towards banks and financial regulation. As part of the inquiry, we use survey experiments to understand whether different ways of framing discussions of finance affect people's preferences for financial regulation and their likelihood of engaging in various forms of political participation.

The media analysis of Banklash brings together an exhaustive compendium of articles that have appeared in the print media in these six countries about banks and banking regulation. We are using computational techniques to explore what the media coverage of banks looks like over time, and how it varies within and across the countries studied. If our survey experiments look at how articles might influence public opinion, the media analysis speaks to how frequently we see different sorts of press coverage of banks in different countries.

The policy analysis dimension of the project aims to understand how post-crisis rules and politics have evolved since the Great Financial Crisis. We are interested in how different countries have chosen different regulatory paths since 2008, and the extent to which such regulation was driven by public opinion and political salience.

This website will be regularly updated with insights from our published and unpublished work. It also provides links to other research in the field that deals with the politics of financial regulation. You can visit the CORDIS site for a brief summary of our findings. Thanks for visiting, and please check back regularly.

Publications

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• Pepper D Culpepper and Taeku Lee. Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026.
   
• Pepper D Culpepper, Ryan Shandler, Jae-Hee Jung and Taeku Lee, "'The economy is rigged': Inequality narratives, fairness, and support for redistribution in six countries." Comparative Political Studies, 2024.
  Replication data here.
   
• Pepper D Culpepper, Jae-Hee Jung and Taeku Lee, "Banklash: How media coverage of bank scandals moves mass preferences on financial regulation." American Journal of Political Science 68(2), 427-444, 2024.
  Replication data here.
   
• Tom Nicholls and Pepper D Culpepper, "Computational identification of media frames: strengths, weaknesses and opportunities." Political Communication 1-2, 159-181, 2020.  Replication data here.

The research on which the following publications are based was not funded by the ERC and preceded the Banklash project. These articles are however an important part of the intellectual trajectory out of which Banklash developed. 

• Pepper D Culpepper and Taeku Lee, "The art of the shitty deal: media frames and public opinion on financial regulation in the United States" Socio-Economic Review, 20(2), 635-657, 2022.
   
• Pepper D Culpepper and Taeku Lee, "Media frames, partisan identification and the Australian banking scandal." Australian Journal of Political Science, 56(1), 73-98, 2021.

Commentary and media

• John Burn-Murdoch "Does the American dream foster inequality?" Financial Times, 8 December 2023 article about our research on inequality and media coverage [gated]. See Twitter/X thread on the article.
   
• Pepper D Culpepper, "FTX and Binance: How latest crypto scandals could influence public opinion on digital currency regulation." The Conversation, 1 December 2023.

Video

Pepper D Culpepper  in conversation with Will Hutton, President of the Academy of Social Sciences, on the book launch of Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How it Could Save Democracy.