The Politics of Whistleblowing in Digitalized Societies

• Date: 01 June 2019
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329219844140
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329219844140

Politics & Society

2019, Vol. 47(2) 277 –297

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329219844140

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Article

The Politics of Whistleblowing

in Digitalized Societies

Thomas Olesen

Aarhus University

Abstract

Works on whistleblowing are overwhelmingly found within disciplines such as business

ethics, law, and the professions. Despite its undeniable political and social effects, it

is surprisingly understudied in political science and sociology. Recent cases such as

those of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Christopher Wylie, and the Panama

Papers should prompt political scientists and sociologists to engage systematically

with the phenomenon. This article offers a theoretically driven discussion of three

complementary questions. (1) What kind of political action is whistleblowing? (2)

What are its historical, social, and political roots? (3) How is the practice shaped by

digitalization and big data? In relation to the third question, the article argues that

digitalization amplifies social complexity and challenges democratic steering. Building

on Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Beck, and Jeffrey Alexander, it lends theoretical weight

to the argument that whistleblowers are likely to play an increasingly pronounced

political role as digitalization accelerates.

Keywords

whistleblowing, digitalization, complexity, democracy, critique

Corresponding Author:

Thomas Olesen, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Bartholins allé 7, Aarhus C, DK-

8000, Denmark.

Email: tho@ps.au.dk

844140PASXXX10.1177/0032329219844140Politics & SocietyOlesen

research-article2019

278 Politics & Society 47(2)

In March 2018, Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on his former employer, Cambridge

Analytica. Wylie claimed, in an interview with the Observer,1 that the company had

systematically harvested Facebook data and used it to help politicians in countries

ranging from Nigeria to the United States develop their digital communication strate-

gies. The revelations unleashed a wave of indignation and calls for reform in Europe

and the United States, putting Facebook on the defensive. Stock market values plum-

meted, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive officer, was summoned to

testify before the UK Parliament and the US Congress. Wylie’s example is only the

latest testament to the power of whistleblowing in recent years. It is hardly an exag-

geration to say that few individual acts can boast the same transformative potential. In

2010, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning’s exposure of classified US military material

provoked intense debate over US military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. In

2013, Edward Snowden’s disclosure of systematic surveillance of citizens and coun-

tries by the US National Security Agency (NSA) caused a global outcry and led to

countless inquiries. Even more recently, the Luxembourg Leaks (2012) by Antoine

Deltour of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the so-called Panama Papers (2015) and

Paradise Papers (2017), leaked by anonymous sources, offered evidence of tax avoid-

ance practices by companies and politicians on a global scale. The leaks led, directly

or indirectly, to the resignation of political leaders and greatly influenced current EU

efforts to devise new legislation to tackle the challenge of offshore finance and other

forms of tax evasion schemes.

Although these cases of whistleblowing are obviously different on a number of

counts, digitalization (human interaction and communication in and through digital

formats) and big data (very large amounts of data that can be processed only with

sophisticated computational tools and expertise) played a central role in all of them. So

far, those developments have not been discussed systematically in political science

and sociology.2 In fact, whistleblowing in general is a surprisingly rare topic in politi-

cal science and sociology. The great majority of works are found within disciplines

such as business ethics, law, organization, and the professions.3 The undeniable, wide-

ranging political and societal effects of whistleblowing in the era of increased digitali-

zation and big data create an important opportunity to address the imbalance.

This article asks three questions. (1) What kind of political action is whistleblow-

ing? (2) What are its historical, social, and political roots? (3) How is the practice

shaped by digitalization and big data? With this exercise, I hope to accomplish two

tasks: in a general sense, to advance an agenda on whistleblowing in political sci-

ence and sociology and, more specifically, to offer a tentative theoretical basis for

understanding the role of whistleblowing in digitalized societies. The purposes for

answering the first two questions are independent, but I consider them necessary

building blocks for addressing the current relationship between whistleblowing and

digitalization.

In a condensed form, this latter argument is as follows. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann

and Ulrich Beck, I argue that whistleblowing arises from and around tensions created

by the combined forces of system autonomy and rising complexity. Those defining

traits of late modern societies generate democratic steering and transparency deficits.