Whatsapp Government

The exercise of public authority has always been shaped by the communication technologies available to its holders. This pattern continues in the age of the smartphone, apparently indispensable to the professional lives of today’s officials and politicians. Yet despite extensive empirical scholarship on the uptake of these devices, underexamined are the questions of legitimacy raised. This paper examines one particular technology – mobile instant messaging of the kind offered by Whatsapp – for how it intersects with the normativity of decision-making. I begin by locating the discussion in the wider study of technology and politics, suggesting we pay greater attention to how far technology encourages authorities to act consistently with the rules and responsibilities their democratic legitimacy depends on. I then look more specifically at what mobile instant messaging implies as it gets drawn into professional use – the affordances it carries and the political outcomes these foster. I highlight the likely tensions with procedural legitimacy, developing the argument with a case-study of the European Union’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, where Whatsapp diplomacy was central to some high-stakes decisions. Finally, I step back to consider the bigger questions of how new technology relates to long-term tendencies in the exercise of authority. As the paper aims to show, the measure of a technology’s political impact is not just to be sought in behavioural change. Mobile instant messaging in government in many ways consolidates patterns that are familiar. The informality and irregularity it enables are not new, though they are reinforced by a technology that makes them permanently available and more easily engaged. Perhaps ultimately more important is how the technology renders these practices traceable. Because the trails of communication produced are hard to control, there is heightened potential for a mismatch between practices and norms to be exposed. Actors are confronted with new risks, ones they will be aware of given an emerging catalogue of scandals. What we can learn then from their willingness to engage the technology in spite of such risks is the extent of their attraction to the informal methods it supports. More precisely, we learn the extent of their disposition to prize output legitimacy, centred on the capacity to get things done, at the expense of procedural legitimacy, the willingness to be bound by rules and norms.