SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center Seminar
Date and Time
Location
Big Tech and Backsliding Liberal Democracies
Presenter
- Juho Lindman, Visiting Scholar, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center. Professor of Information Systems, Department of Applied IT, University of Gothenburg.
Moderator
- Jocelyn Viterna, Codirector, SCANCOR at the Weatherhead Center; Faculty Associate; Harvard Academy Senior Scholar. Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology; Chair, Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University.
Contact
Diana Ocampo Belloso
dianaocampobelloso@wcfia.harvard.edu
Abstract
Co-author: Jukka Veikko Mäkinen, Professor of Business Ethics, Estonian Business School.
The concentration of structural power in Big Tech companies, as providers of key social infrastructure, poses an undertheorized challenge to liberal democracies in the democratic backsliding literature. Drawing on Rawlsian political philosophy, this talk argues that this structural power corrodes the separation between economic and political power on which background justice and the fair value of political liberties depend. Two cases illustrate how the same institutional vulnerability, the absence of a property-owning democracy in both the Nordic states and the United States, manifests in two ways: concentrated private capital gaining disproportionate influence over domestic welfare-state institutions, and such domestically entrenched influence projected outward against another jurisdiction’s regulatory sovereignty. The first examines hyperscale data centers in the Nordic welfare states, from Google’s facility in Hamina (Finland) and Meta’s in Luleå (Sweden) to Google’s newly announced €13 billion expansion in Finland. Here, public sector actors compete to host foreign-owned server farms with tax subsidies, land, and grid capacity built for public benefit, redirecting welfare-state instruments toward corporate infrastructure. This mirrors the dynamic Rawls anticipated when he argued that welfare-state capitalism lets concentrated private capital exert influence over public institutions and erode the fair value of political liberties. The second case turns to the European Union, where US-based Big Tech contests regulatory authority through lobbying, strategic litigation, and alignment with transatlantic geopolitical pressure against EU policy instruments and the European Union’s regulatory sovereignty. Together, the cases outline an agenda for studying how the blurring of economic and political power drives democratic backsliding.