|| This seminar is open ONLY to EUI members ||

Join us for the next event of the 'Finance in the Tuscan Hills' seminar series, where we are happy to host Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford.

In this seminar, Culpepper reviews a series of findings from the Banklash research project, a 5-year advanced grant from the European Research Council to study the politics of financial regulation after the crisis. He highlights three insights from the project. First, drawing on large representative online samples from six countries, he shows that public views on financial regulation are tied to a standard set of demographic and dispositional factors, and that they are clearly distinct from political views on redistribution. Attitudes on regulating banks are not merely reflections of non-economic dimensions of politics, such as populism, racial resentment, and authoritarian disposition. Second, his research shows that news about financial scandals increases public preferences for financial regulation, starting from what is already a high baseline level. Drawing on data from over 27,000 survey respondents in our six countries, he shows that this finding is robust across countries and across different scandals. Third, he presents case study evidence on the way in which scandals have played a role in concentrating public attention on the issue of financial regulation in the post-crisis era, putting politicians under pressure to pass regulation that the public wants but that big banks oppose. Contra views that have dismissed scandal-driven regulation as bad public policy, he finds that corporate scandals are important drivers of democratic responsiveness. 

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Pepper Culpepper is Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. He is Vice-Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, where his research explores the junction between capitalism and democracy.

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The FBF seminar series ‘Finance in the Tuscan Hills’ focuses on financial sector issues and aims to bring together researchers from across the EUI community, who share an interest in these subjects.