Anti-Corruption Initiatives and the Digital Challenge: The Role of Civil Society Organizations and Whistleblowing Infrastructures in the Italian Context

Abstract

Civil society organizations increasingly rely on digital technologies to intervene in the whistleblowing process and advance their anti-corruption goals. However, scholars have yet to investigate how civil society organizations’ use of digital technologies impacts their role as whistleblowing actors and what consequences this might entail. Moving from this gap, the article explores how civil society organizations exploit digital technologies to intervene in the whistleblowing process and how their use of digital technologies affects patterns of interactions with institutional actors in the whistleblowing process. The article combines situational and thematic analysis to investigate three whistleblowing initiatives deployed by Italian civil society organizations: Linea Libera, the Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre for Whistleblowers, and Whistleblowing PA. The results show that grassroots whistleblowing initiatives are more than just services or tools but represent whistleblowing infrastructures, running on more or less sophisticated technologies, which grant their developers a role as low- or high-tech intermediaries in the whistleblowing process, in turn affecting the relational dynamics between grassroots and institutional actors and civil society organizations’ influence over the whistleblowing process.