In wake of public outrage, professor sees hope for democracy

Could frustration with billionaires and corporate power bring about a resurgence in American democracy?

Taeku Lee believes it’s possible. The Bae Family Professor of Government has studied corporate scandals and how the ensuing outrage can spur legislative change. In “Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy,” Lee and co-author Pepper Culpepper draw on a decade of research in policymaking and public opinion to uncover how corporate misdeeds can be channeled into policy reform.

In an interview, edited for length and clarity, Lee discussed why some corporate scandals fizzle and how a healthy dose of public outrage can promote the common good.

Can you talk about the book’s stance on 21st-century tech giants?

We take as a point of departure the rise of tech giants and the inordinate power they seem to have — including entities like SpaceX and Starlink, which do some of the work traditionally expected of governments — and compare our current period to the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which people think of as the Gilded Age and the age of the robber barons.

What’s instructive about 1890 is that it was a period of rapid technological change, dramatic demographic change, rampant political corruption, deepening social and sectoral divisions, all amid great concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. There are a lot of analogies to our current era.

This was also a period with an opening for the kind of scandal-related democratic politics we see as a potential for today. We start the book by talking about the muckrakers like Upton Sinclair. The issue of food safety had been on the policy agenda for a long time. We talk about how Congress proposed about 200 bills on the issue, all of which died ignominious deaths because of the sheer power of lobbying interests — until a scandal was revealed by Sinclair to the public, which had the nearly instantaneous effect of halving sales of beef in the United States.

Within months, legislation was proposed and ultimately enacted and signed by Teddy Roosevelt. That was the precursor to the Food and Drug Administration.

Your book also covers the fact that some scandals provoke no reaction.

Part of what gives scandals their power is the potential to coordinate and activate individuals’ private unhappiness with different corporations or with the political process or with the degree to which they think business interests have an excessive influence on policy and regulation. What scandals can do is create a focal moment, where — all of a sudden — public attention is concentrated on one issue. It both informs people about one dimension of, let’s say, policy or regulation, and it also gets them very angry all at once and altogether. That can create a counterweight to the influence of business interests in a way that can create the possibility for regulatory reform.

There are cases where that doesn’t happen. There are two kinds of fundamentals, if you will, that shape the way people think about a lot of political issues. One is partisan polarization, the other racial polarization. These fundamentals can override the potential for scandals to spark change.

One example we talk about in the book is environmental degradation of Louisiana in the Lake Charles region and how a town that had been historically thriving, even pre-Civil War, for freed Black people essentially died at the hands of petrochemical corporations. This failed to capture the imagination of fellow Louisianans because of what we describe as an “empathy wall” across racial divides.

What is the appetite for change in the U.S. today?

I think there’s a huge appetite for change. Unfortunately, that appetite does not seem to be reflected in the parties or the candidates most voters have to choose from. And that goes back quite a while.

In our data, we saw the same kind of appetite for change in 2016 leading American voters who favored Bernie Sanders to also favor Donald Trump, which might seem quite paradoxical, but it taps into this underlying appetite for reform to a system that seems to work for some people, especially those monied interests, and not work for the majority of others.

Any hope or advice for bringing about beneficial change?

The main source of hope in our book is the story of policy entrepreneurs. It’s insufficient to just have an angry mob. You also need people who are working in the trenches, advocating for change in particular domains. We talk about the Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and how he has been giving his “Time to Wake Up” speech on the Senate floor, like, 300 times, trying to raise attention around climate change.

We talk about Max Schrems, an Austrian law student who wanted to spend time in California. He did a visiting semester at Santa Clara Law School. There, he heard a talk from a Facebook lawyer, which made him realize these companies have an enormous amount of private information about all of us and they’re monetizing it for their own benefit. Combined with Edward Snowden’s revelations in the PRISM scandal, that essentially created the preconditions for some of the strongest privacy rights regulations anywhere with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

There are many instances in our book of these ordinary, run-of-the-mill people who are very invested in particular kinds of reform. But they have to wait for something like a scandal for a window of opportunity to open. Then they can step in and say, “This is what the voters want in terms of actual regulatory reform.”

That sounds quite optimistic.

We want to remind readers that there are so many bad things going on in democracies right now, and there are many books describing the many different ways in which democracies might die. We wanted to insert into that stream some research showing this is not necessarily our fate. There are ways in which we might return to a more democratic politics.