Grassroots fights against corruption in the digital age: infrastructural activism in Italy and Spain

This thesis examines the challenges and opportunities of the digital age for anti-corruption activism, casting light on a specific form of activism, called infrastructural activism. This form of activism expands the repertoire of action and contention of civil society actors by creating the preconditions for the development, maintenance, and diffusion of different types of socio-technical infrastructures: grassroots and institutionalized whistleblowing infrastructures, on the one hand, and community and platform-based monitoring infrastructures, on the other. Indeed, the research considers two types of initiatives, located between Italy and Spain, that over time have incorporated different types of digital technologies into their anti-corruption practices for two main purposes. First, to facilitate whistleblowing by implementing the adoption of open-source software that guarantees high standards of security and anonymity. Second, to monitor governmental actors and combat institutional opacity through the use of public data, open databases, and data-driven platforms. Bridging corruption and social movement studies with science and technology, media, and journalism studies, this thesis identifies a specific perspective for looking at the grassroots anti-corruption struggle in platform and datafied societies. Indeed, infrastructural activism and related infrastructures play a pivotal role in this struggle by anchoring not only the efforts of civil society organizations but also the efforts of other actors who may use (or replicate) them to detect corruption or prevent it by increasing transparency. Thus, adopting the lens of infrastructural activism, this dissertation contributes to social movement studies by encouraging a debate on how the broader process of “infrastructuralization of platform-based services”, in which platforms acquire certain characteristics of infrastructures, can also affect platforms and technologies developed by grassroots collective actors.