Public Anger, Business Power, and the Regulation of Finance in the UK and the US

Both the United Kingdom and the United State adopted epochal post-crisis financial regulation limiting the capacities of banks and other large financial institutions. When banks tried to resist these reforms, drawing on the substantial resources available to them in lobbying and access, they ran into different obstacles in the two countries. In the US, public anger towards bankers appears not to have changed broader attitudes toward inequality and regulation, but it has provided a potent resource on which political entrepreneurs have been able to draw to push legislation through a recalcitrant congress. In the UK, eruptions of public anger appear to be less easily embraced by would-be entrepreneurs to change the course of policy reform: the course of reform was almost a pure product of the fact of coalition government, and the course of reform was little changed by public eruptions of anger. We compare the different avenues through which anger towards elites entered the political process in the two countries and try to understand how to incorporate the way in which anger influences the scope and success of business power in contemporary democracy.