Anti-corruption (digital) technologies, citizens participation, and the quality of democracy

Corruption is a global social problem that affects the lives of millions of people across the world. Among others, a wide array of grassroots initiatives developed in the past decade that see digital media's employment to counter corruption. Instead of focusing on massive protests in the streets, these initiatives frequently rely on protest participants' digital engagement, develop forms of non-contentious collective actions, and employ the creation and transformation of data about corruption as leverage to support their mobilization. In so doing, these initiatives also attempt to increase the accountability of democratic institutions and hybrid regimes' fallacies and constraints. In other words, the use of digital media to counter corruption from the grassroots also work towards the expansion of democratic participation, supporting mechanisms of social and societal accountability. How people imagine, create, and employ digital media to counter corruption from the grassroots is a significant lens to understand and evaluate the future of democracy as a process. Despite their global diffusion and growing importance for the anti-corruption sector and their theoretical significance to understand changes in the quality of democracy, we still have little knowledge about these phenomena that remain heavily understudies. Based on the BIT-ACT research project, this paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature and propose some reflections on how anti-corruption (digital) technologies entangle changes in democratic and hybrid political systems. This paper draws on a cross-country comparative research project that analyzes 9 case studies in 9 countries in Europe, Latin America, North-Africa, and South-Asia. More specifically, it relies on a dataset that includes documents related to the 18 case studies and in-depth interviews with the activists involved in the creation of initiative against corruption that put at the center different types of digital media that are created and managed by activists themselves. Relying on a preliminary thematic analysis of these data, the paper first develops a typology of such initiatives and the related anti-corruption technologies they create and/or employ to counter corruption. Then it discusses the imaginaries related to the quality of democracy that emerge concerning the use of digital media to fight corruption. Finally, the paper considers how these imaginaries translate to create specific anti-corruption (digital) technologies, focusing on their affordances related to the quality of democracy and their consequences.