Democracy’s Autonomy Dilemma: Whistleblowing and the Politics of Disclosure

Scope of the Argument

It is important to clarify a few things before proceeding. I expressly do not claim that autonomy more or less automatically produces wrongdoing, only that it is a potential built into the process of differentiation. It follows from this point that there is no necessary conflictual opposition between “closed” and “open.” In most situations, in fact, there is a relatively frictionless exchange between inside and outside, as when the legal system makes its decisions available to the public or when journalists can ask for access to political and administrative documents. In fact, examples like these testify to how deeply the demand for visibility is integrated into our democratic thinking. The politics of disclosure is focused on the instances where these procedures are neglected and suppressed or when they simply turn out to be inadequate to detect and rectify wrongdoing.

Such situations seem to be more prevalent within some systems and organizations than others. The argument about democracy’s autonomy dilemma is particularly attuned to what I call normalized wrongdoing. This form of wrongdoing, I claim, is most likely to occur in systems and organizations structured by profit, power, or security logics. They are situations where the dominant logic has become so pervasive or perverted that practices have veered off into illegal or immoral terrain. Wrongdoing in these cases does not happen because of autonomy but, rather, because of the way autonomous introversion allows the development of problematic organizational cultures and practices.

In other systems, such as health, journalism, and law, wrongdoing often attains a different character. Problematic practices in these domains tend to arise not so much due to code perversion but due to code clashes (Borch 2011:73). Code clashes occur when a system’s dominant code is disturbed by logics from another. When police officers, for example, collaborate with drug cartels, their professional goals and ethics are “polluted” by logics from the “outside.” A similar dynamic is at play when an editor decides not to run a critical piece for fear of political reprisals. In such cases, wrongdoing revolves around the violation or disturbance of autonomy rather than its inward-looking nature. The kind of wrongdoing that informs this article’s theoretical argument about democracy’s autonomy dilemma and defines the empirical examples I discuss mainly belongs in the latter category, where codes are perverted from the inside. As I suggested, these dynamics are usually encountered in private corporations, states, governments, parties, and security apparatuses.

Finally, this article focuses on external whistleblowing (Dworkin and Baucus 1998). In contrast to internal whistleblowing, which is made and stays in-house, external whistleblowers approach entities (e.g., the press) outside their organizations to voice their concerns. Although I do not make normative distinctions between these types, external whistleblowing carries more weight for a sociological attempt to place whistleblowers on a wider social and political canvas. It is when whistleblowers go public that democracy’s autonomy dilemma comes most forcefully to the fore. I thus rely on Jubb’s (1999:78) definition of whistleblowing as

a deliberate non-obligatory act of disclosure, which gets onto public record and is made by a person who has or had privileged access to data or information of an organization, about non-trivial illegality or other wrongdoing whether actual, suspected or anticipated which implicates and is under the control of that organization, to an external entity having potential to rectify the wrongdoing.

The Politics of Disclosure

In the standard sociological account, advanced societies are parceled out into a variety of systems or fields that each handle specific “tasks” (Bourdieu 1987; Luhmann 1995). Such differentiation has been seen as a response to growing social complexity (Luhmann 1995) and a solution to a range of democratic challenges, as when we celebrate, for example, freedom of the press (Alexander 1981). Such a setup requires extensive autonomy: Systems and their various organizations must function with reasonable independence and according to their own norms, logics, and codes (Luhmann 1995). At the same time, we insist this autonomy must never be complete, that citizens in a democracy have a “right to know” (Schudson 2015) what goes on inside governments, states, and corporations. Autonomy and specialization are important, even necessary, qualities in democracies, but they also arrive, as Luhmann (1995) reminds us, with a risk of social “blindness” and introversion when dominant codes and logics are pursued to the extreme. Every system, Luhmann (1997:50) says, is thus autopoietic; it “orients itself by its own distinctions, thus by its own construction of reality and thus also by its own code.” As noted earlier, autopoiesis does not necessarily generate wrongdoing—far from it. However, because of its inward-looking nature, the potential for code-driven wrongdoing is a constant presence.

As such, autopoiesis also indicates some of the limits of the checks-and-balances setup that early democratic thinkers envisioned as a means to avoid abuse of power. Different authorities and institutions do constrain each other, but this is, as history effectively teaches us, not a guarantee against wrongdoing. In some cases, the watcher may decide to turn a blind eye or may simply not know where and when to look either because of a lack of resources and information or simply because wrongdoers are able to successfully hide their practices. Furthermore, it has become increasingly evident that serious wrongdoing occurs not only within public and political organizations but also in private corporations (e.g., the 2001 Enron scandal and the 2007 Morgan Stanley meltdown), which are not governed by a strict checks-and-balances routine. ¹

Our common social language, as a result, is full of “watchdogs,” “informers,” “moles,” “leakers,” and, of course, “whistleblowers,” just as we routinely append the suffix “gate” to any situation where wrongful, hidden practices have been “societalized” (Alexander 2018) and hung out to dry in the public sphere (Schudson 1992). These are all part of a decidedly modern vocabulary where the exposure of confidential and sometimes secret and protected information is at stake (Bok 1982; Horn 2011; Rosanvallon 2008; Thompson 2000), often with wide-ranging social, cultural, and democratic consequences.

This tension between autonomy and disclosure, between discretion and publicity, has deep historical roots (Keane 2018). The second part of the eighteenth century saw the forced entry of “the people” into modernity, with the symbolic watershed moment of the French Revolution in 1789. As Tilly (1995) shows, this was not a one-off event but reflective of a broader pattern where people began to organize their claims in social movements and public protest. These powerful winds of change were inextricably linked to a redefinition of publicity where in Habermas’s ([1962] 1989) analysis, the public sphere was no longer confined to spectacles of authority but a space where political and clerical authority could be debated and critiqued by citizens (Thompson 2011:57).

These new understandings of publicity were formulated by thinkers like Bentham, Kant, and Rousseau in the second part of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries (Hood 2006), with Bentham’s treatise “Of Publicity” stating perhaps the strongest case. Bentham (1838–1843:315) viewed publicity as a contrast to secrecy, which, he claimed, “is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.” In the vocabulary of differentiation theory, these concerns expressed an increasing consciousness about system boundaries. In sounding a call for visibility, Bentham (1838–1843:314) recognized that the spheres of state and government work according to their own set of logics, and these logics, with their “great temptations to abuse” authority, may sometimes produce adverse effects for society and its citizens. Furthermore, this observation also contained an emerging realization that something like a politics of disclosure would be needed to monitor and keep these logics in check (Rosanvallon 2008).

From our historical vantage point, it may be easy to think of Bentham (1838–1843:314) as a heady optimist in claiming that “under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.” Part of his optimism came down to his belief that those in power could be convinced, through rational and instrumental arguments, to do the right thing. In many ways, however, Bentham’s optimism was not entirely misplaced. During the nineteenth century, for example, states gradually installed ombudsman and public access systems that would grant citizens insight into state affairs and provide them with mechanisms to lodge complaints (Hood 2006).

These important innovations reflected mounting pressure from various forces in society, but they were ultimately top-down efforts. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the pendulum swung decisively to alter this balance. Across the Western world, during the 1960s and 1970s, “new powers of oversight developed, and old ones were reorganized and refocused” (Rosanvallon 2008:83). Beginning in the 1960s, journalism acquired a new watchdog orientation, which found its first high-impact resonance with the Watergate scandal in 1975 (Alexander and Jacobs 1998; Schudson 1992). In the same period, political protest and activism proliferated, challenging party membership and voting as the dominant modes of political participation (Meyer and Tarrow 1998).

Whistleblowing, as noted earlier, had obviously been practiced before this period, but it had not crystallized into a distinct, clearly defined, and legitimate action repertoire. This started to happen during the late 1960s and early 1970s (Olesen 2021b; Vandekerckhove 2006). Compared to journalism and activism, with their deep, high-profile histories, whistleblowing was a relative latecomer to the ethos of disclosure. The concept was first coined and given form in the United States, with a string of trend-setting publications by, in particular, Ralph Nader and colleagues (1972) and Charles Peters and Taylor Branch (1972). These seminal works were not simply the product of wishful, critical thinking but were responses to a range of high-profile, real-world cases of whistleblowing. ²

The proliferation of protest, advocacy, watchdog journalism, and whistleblowing radically changed the democratic landscape in this period. Together, these actors became proponents of a new ethos of forced publicity that insisted on the right to expose information without the consent of those who “owned” that information and without necessarily following sanctioned channels. This understanding of publicity and visibility still largely defines how we think of transgression and disclosure today. To label these dynamics as forced publicity is not to say they were (or are) opposed by the state. In fact, freedom of the press and the right to protest are among the legal cornerstones of democracies, and in recent decades, many countries have established laws that offer protection for whistleblowers (Vandekerckhove 2006; see also the “Conclusion” for a discussion of recent trends in this area). The ethos of forced publicity, in other words, is couched within a wider political framework where the transgression of organization boundaries is institutionalized and even encouraged.

This may seem somewhat paradoxical, but one can think of it as a product of the increasing social reflexivity (Beck 1994) that has characterized the late modern, democratic experience beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. A reflexive society is a self-critical and self-observing society with a dizzying array of actors engaged in constant monitoring of themselves and each other. As such, the new-found prominence of whistleblowing in the 1960s and 1970s reflected a decline in trust in authority (Inglehart 1977) as well as a more general realization of the limits of democratic steering (Beck [1986] 1992). During these decades, the disclosure of security negligence in the automobile, aviation, and nuclear industries; military surveillance; and hidden government agendas created a sense across the Western world that the democratic, regulatory systems were no longer in full control and that additional, more citizen-driven sources of scrutiny were necessary to ensure justice and accountability. Importantly, this involved a profound redefinition of citizens’ social role templates, away from top-down, hierarchical forms of organization and toward more individualized modes of intervention. These changes were particularly influential in the emergence of whistleblowing. Disclosing confidential information about one’s organization in the public sphere involves a radical breach of loyalty. This “liberation” of individual employees to act against their organizations despite contractual obligations and bonds of loyalty required a social climate where notions of hierarchy and obedience were ethically and politically rebalanced toward the individual (for an extended discussion of the emergence of the concept of whistleblowing, see Olesen 2021b).

Observations like these also suggest why early advocates of whistleblowing considered this particular form of corrective action to offer something that other critical actors, such as activists and journalists, did not. Whistleblowers stood for a radical expansion of the politics of disclosure, an opportunity to lay bare the deepest domains of organizations to scrutiny. From their privileged insider and (individual) employee position, whistleblowers have access to information that is normally off limits and invisible to even the most diligent and critical journalists, activists, and lawmakers.

Varieties of Field Transgression

Placing whistleblowers within this broader ethos of disclosure, transgression, and social self-criticism is central to identifying their democratic role and contribution. However, as noted earlier, their position is also sui generis. The role of whistleblowers needs to be carefully disentangled from that of other democratic field transgressors such as journalists and activists and from actors who engage in field transgression for nondemocratic reasons. Whistleblowers’ distinct position in democracy’s autonomy dilemma resides in the fact that they are insiders who disclose wrongdoing occurring within their own organizations. Whistleblowers are always “organization members (former or current)” (Near and Miceli 1985:4), typically in an employment situation with contractual or moral obligations toward their employer. It is precisely the “privileged access to data or information” (Jubb 1999:78) that sets the whistleblower apart from other actors engaged in the politics of disclosure.

This privileged position is often a relatively isolated one. ³ Journalists, for example, stand on the basis of a well-established and legitimate profession with clearly defined values and sets of state-sanctioned rights (Hallin and Mancini 2004). ⁴ This also implies that journalists are embedded in collegial networks where they can interact with peers along preestablished lines of professional norms. The whistleblower also has peers and colleagues, but because whistleblowers find themselves in a process of loyalty reversion, peers can be difficult to approach through a shared language. In fact, many whistleblowers experience retaliation not just from their organization but also from colleagues who feel provoked by the whistleblower’s disloyalty (Park, Bjørkelo, and Blenkinsopp 2020).

These different points of departure make the whistleblower’s field transgression riskier and more precarious. The whistleblower typically plays with higher stakes, potentially jeopardizing employment and career, and often risks severe retaliation (Alford 2002). In this way, the whistleblower shares traits with the parrhesiastes of ancient Greece (Foucault 2001). Parrhesia, in Foucault’s interpretation, is a form of truth-telling or fearless speech, which is differentiated from other speech situations by the risk the parrhesiastes takes. It demands the courage, Foucault (2001:11) says, “to speak the truth in spite of some danger. And in its extreme form, telling the truth takes place in the ‘game’ of life or death” (for applications of the notion of parrhesia in whistleblower research, see, e.g., Vandekerckhove and Langenberg 2012; Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch 2016).

In their early discussion of whistleblowing, Peters and Branch (1972:5) observed clear affinities between whistleblowers and journalists but were sensitive to their differences: “Real and apprehended obstacles demand from the whistle-blower a quantum jump in commitment, far beyond what is demanded of an ordinary muckraker—who has no attachment to his target to make him hesitate.” Compared to the journalist (or “muckraker”), the whistleblower’s intervention is both “more courageous and complex” (Peters and Branch 1972:4). These risks and complexities stem from the fact that whistleblowing occurs from the inside (Bok 1982:214). This inevitably casts a shadow of suspicion where, in Peters and Branch’s (1972:5) strong formulation, the whistleblower must go public “in a way that looks soapboxy and cocky and messiah-bitten.” In “betraying” their organization, whistleblowers come up against the weight of a deep history where “the loathing of tattlers and turncoats has been almost universal for centuries” (Peters and Branch 1972:18).

An employee’s decision to go public is rarely taken lightly. The whistleblower literature more or less uniformly documents that the majority of people who eventually choose to become external whistleblowers see it as a last resort after internal complaint procedures have been exhausted (Rothschild and Miethe 1999:119) and their sense of loyalty and commitment has been stretched to the breaking point (Kenny, Fotak, and Vandekerckhove 2020; Weiskopf and Willmott 2013). If we return to Peters and Branch’s (1972) formulation, whistleblowers’ professional and emotional attachment to their “target” inevitably makes them “hesitate.” As a result, external whistleblowing is often transformative at a deep level of self-understanding and identity. It is telling of its radical nature that the large majority of external whistleblowers never return to their original profession.

As Table 1 clarifies, the distinction between whistleblowers and other field transgressors such as journalists and activists revolves around the “direction” of the transgression. Despite these differences, whistleblowers, activists, and journalists are comparable in that their transgression generally has a democratic, public interest motivation. Transgression, however, can also occur with more self-interested objectives in mind. As a result, whistleblowers are always in danger of being coded into adjacent, negative categories of transgressors, such as leakers, spies, traitors, troublemakers, or attention seekers (Peters and Branch 1972:5). ⁵ When this happens, whistleblowers cannot resort to professional status and supportive organizational resources in the same way as journalists and activists. Whistleblowers’ isolated position means their “character” is in a sense the last line of defense, leaving them highly vulnerable to credibility attacks.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Varieties of Field Transgression.

	From the inside	From the outside
Public interest	E.g., whistleblowing: employees expose wrongdoings observed in their organizations to an external entity; the disclosure is in the public-democratic interest.	E.g., journalism: a professional journalist exposes wrongdoings in organizations through methods of investigative reporting; the exposé is in the public-democratic interest.
Private	E.g., leaking: employees in an organization hand over sensitive material to an external entity to advance the political or economic interests of the leaker or their collaborators.	E.g., hacking: outsiders get unauthorized access to an organization’s or individual’s sensitive material to advance the political or economic interests of the hackers or their collaborators.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the demarcation of democratically legitimate field transgression is generally written into the legal frameworks that support whistleblowing. The United Kingdom’s policy (United Kingdom Government n.d.), for example, clarifies that “the wrongdoing you disclose must be in the public interest. This means it must affect others, for example the general public.” A similar note is struck in the United States’s Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (which set the legal framework for the White House whistleblower in 2019). The document (Congressional Research Service 2019) states that legitimate whistleblowing must always be motivated by an “urgent concern,” that is, “a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, violation of law or executive order,” and this “does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters.”

For whistleblowing to merit protection, the underlying motivation must concern, as these excerpts clearly convey, more than idiosyncratic grievances and disagreements. This emphasis on public interest in protective legislation is mirrored in whistleblower research. This work generally finds that when whistleblowers disclose confidential information, they rarely do so for egotistical reasons or to obtain political or economic advantages. Research consistently shows that whistleblowers generally do not intend to hurt their organization (Rothschild 2013:891). Rather, they act out of frustration that organizational and professional ethics have become corrupted to an extent where practices begin to negatively affect society and others in or outside the organization. Whistleblowers, as a result, often view themselves (and are seen as such by most researchers) as “prosocial” actors (Dozier and Miceli 1985; Grant 2002; Lewis, Brown, and Moberly 2014). ⁶

The Normalization of Wrongdoing

The combination of prosocial intentions and a privileged employee position highlighted in Table 1 lets us take the next step in identifying the whistleblower’s distinct place in democracy’s autonomy dilemma. We need to return here to Luhmann’s (1995) insight that autopoiesis potentially generates introversion and sometimes even “blindness” in systems and organizations, structured as they are around specific codes. This leads to communication difficulties: Codes, Luhmann reminds us, constitute different “languages” that cannot easily be translated to one another. Differentiation is a cornerstone of democracy, but it contains a flipside, an inbuilt risk that codes may become perverted to an extent where wrongdoing is normalized (Ashforth and Anand 2003) within an organization. As organization insiders, whistleblowers have front-row seats to such wrongdoing in a way that outsiders (e.g., journalists and lawmakers) can never obtain.

The organization (e.g., a private corporation, a state agency, a political party, a nongovernmental organization), which is central to most whistleblower definitions (Jubb 1999; Near and Miceli 1985), is a smaller unit than Luhmann’s typical “systems.” Yet organizations are always anchored within specific system domains and thus function according to their own overarching logics. Luhmann (2000), for example, argues that although individual media organizations differ in multiple ways, they share certain fundamental notions about newsworthiness and “good” journalism. In discussing the importance of news criteria, Luhmann (2000:27) points out how these concepts refer “to the function system of the mass media and not to its individual organizations (editorial boards), whose freedom to make decisions in choosing the news items they run is much less than critics often suppose.” In a similar manner, political parties use binary codes and logics from the political system, hospitals those of the health system, and schools those of the education system.

If we understand whistleblowers as organization members (Near and Miceli 1985:4) who disclose wrongdoing that is “under the control of that organisation” (Jubb 1999:78), it follows that they operate within a regime defined by their organization’s and system’s dominant codes. This observation is crucial to understanding the wrongdoings that whistleblowers typically react to. In most cases, whistleblowers are highly skilled professionals; they owe their role in their organization to competences obtained through professional education and training. This professional training entails the development of skills and knowledge necessary to fulfill professional roles, but it also, implicitly or explicitly, nurtures certain ethical understandings of duties and obligations tied to that profession (Abbott 1983; Weber 1968).

When professionals enter into an employment relationship, they do so with the expectation to work in accordance with these ethics. Whistleblower accounts often tell the story of how such expectations are disappointed. In 2014, Antoine Deltour, a PwC auditor, blew the whistle on Luxembourg’s favorable tax deals with multinational corporations like Pepsi and IKEA, which PwC helped administrate. These practices were not technically illegal, but Deltour experienced a growing professional discomfort: “Normally auditors are a bit like regulators. It is a useful profession. . . . But I wasn’t feeling at home in that environment. Bit by bit I discovered how extreme the system was . . . it was a massive tax optimisation practice. I didn’t want to be part of that” (Bowers 2014).

It is a recurring theme in whistleblower accounts such as Deltour’s that professional ethics clash with the logics of profit maximation. In Luhmannian terms, private corporations are organized around profit logics, which can potentially subsume and eclipse more social concerns. Jeffrey Wigand, who in 1995 famously exposed Brown and Williamson’s use of carcinogenic chemicals in their tobacco products (dramatized in Michael Mann’s The Insider [1999]), entered the corporation as a biochemical scientist with the intention to develop safer cigarettes. When he discovered the use of coumarin, a known carcinogenic used to mask foul odors, in some of the corporation’s tobacco products, he took his concerns to the corporation’s president. According to Wigand, the president’s answer was flatly dismissive because the removal of coumarin would “affect sales” (quoted in Armenakis 2004).

In both cases, Deltour and Wigand experienced an affront to their professional ethics that emerged from the socially adverse effects of profit logics. It should not be a surprise to any professional that private corporations are governed by profit logics, so the notion of socially adverse effects is an important qualifier. Whistleblower reactions appear where the profit logic becomes so pervasive and dominant that it crosses into the domain of “illegal, immoral and illegitimate practices” (Near and Miceli 1985:4). We may usefully, in the spirit of Luhmann, think of this dynamic as a kind of code perversion. From the whistleblower’s perspective, code perversion involves an intolerable violation of professional ethics and how these are connected with their profession’s place in society. When Deltour, in the aforementioned quote, refers to auditing as a “useful profession,” he is clearly suggesting it serves an important role for society and its citizens.

The perversion of profit logics is not the only producer of socially adverse effects. If we return to the opening example of the Ukraine whistleblower, Trump’s infamous phone call also involved code perversion. The dominant code of the political system is power-nonpower. Viewed through this lens, the phone call made good sense, as Trump strove to improve his reelection chances. Yet the whistleblower reacted precisely because the act crossed the line between acceptable and illegitimate/illegal power strategies.

Code perversion within the state and political system, albeit at a different and more systematic level, was also a primary motivation behind Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013. Snowden, a computer specialist, had entered the security services as a patriot intent on aiding the United States in the struggle against terrorism. Over time, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency (NSA), which he felt violated core U.S. democratic principles without the knowledge of the American public and lawmakers (Snowden 2019). An organization such as the NSA works through the binary code of security-insecurity. From the basis of this logic, practices that produce “more” security are important. For Snowden, however, this code blinded the organization and the actors within it to the wider social and democratic implications of its practices.

In his foundational discussion of the sociology of secrets, Simmel (1906:449) defined secrets as “consciously willed concealment.” He put this definition to work in relation mainly to “secret societies,” such as Freemasons. Although the whistleblower’s disclosure of code perversions in “operationally closed” systems or organizations (Luhmann 1995) often appears as the revelation of a secret to the outside observer, they are not, at least not necessarily, secrets in this Simmelian sense of “willed concealment.” Because the wrongdoings whistleblowers bring to public attention are often practiced openly within the organization and with the knowledge and collusion of numerous individuals, it makes more sense to think of them as open secrets or “conspiracies of silence” (Zerubavel 2006). Consider, for example, the tax evasion practices revealed by the Panama and Paradise Papers (both brought to public attention by anonymous whistleblowers in collaboration with the Süddeutsche Zeitung). These practices were so widespread and systematic that it is hardly meaningful to see them as secrets in a narrow sense or to think of the actors as constituting some kind of secret society. Luhmann’s notion of autopoiesis and Zerubavel’s “conspiracies of silence” are more apt descriptors because they point to the way code perversions often acquire a degree of normalization (Ashforth and Anand 2003) among the participating actors. ⁷

The retainment of such open secrets is only possible as long as those in the know keep quiet and maintain extensive organizational loyalty. When these structures are in place, it becomes difficult for even the most diligent lawmakers and critical journalists and activists to detect and document the wrongdoing. As employees, whistleblowers are in a unique position to alert society to such practices that have gone under the public radar. As discussed in the “Scope of the Argument” section, code perversion is not exhaustive of the types of wrongdoing whistleblowers report (Skivenes and Trygstad 2014), but disclosures of normalized wrongdoing are, in my view, among the most significant form of information that whistleblowers bring to the table and, not least, the one that most vividly exposes democracy’s autonomy dilemma.

The Exposure of Gray Areas

We can now pursue this line of reasoning further. Luhmann (1997:49) notes how differentiated societies have “delegated all the problems” and there are no “agencies that could . . . perceive all the functions.” The result, he says, is that there is “no self-steering of society on the level of the entire system.” These challenges have only become more pressing with the exponential growth in knowledge and technology (Beck [1986] 1992, 1994; Castells 1996). The politics of disclosure, with its proliferation of decentralized modes of scrutiny and critique, is in many ways a response to such a situation and one where whistleblowers, for the reasons I elaborated in the preceding sections, play a distinct role. This is also a position of power that, under some circumstances, can generate significant political effects. These effects are, in my view, most prominent in regard to gray areas that up until the point of disclosure have escaped public and political oversight. I prefer the notion of gray areas to, say, dark or secret areas. As such, the concept lies in clear continuation of the normalization of wrongdoing that I discussed earlier. It is compatible with Luhmann’s (1995) and Zerubavel’s (2006) ideas because it points to practices that may be legally or morally problematic from society’s point of view but have become normalized within an organization or network of actors. Gray, then, has a double meaning here: First, it suggests the wrongdoing is not entirely invisible or hidden; second, it indicates the exposed practices are often surrounded by substantial legal-political uncertainty.

We may approach the effect of whistleblowing on the democratic process via two theoretical models of democracy: competitive (Schumpeter [1942] 1972) and deliberative (Habermas 1996). From the perspective of the competitive model, whistleblowers provide important information for citizens and consumers in their decision-making and opinion-formation processes. Information about wrongdoing in governments, authorities, and corporations affects trust and approval, often with tangible consequences for politicians and corporations. Whistleblowers’ provision of information for citizens’ opinion formation is a prominent contribution to the democratic process, but the full potential of whistleblowing for democracy is realized when disclosures concern moral and legal gray areas. This dimension is most usefully analyzed through the model of deliberative democracy (Habermas 1996). The competitive model proceeds from a basis where citizens (and consumers) with relatively fixed interests choose between different options in a market of ideas and products. The deliberative model of democracy is more sensitive to situations where interests are not fixed and where citizens and lawmakers politicize issues surrounded by uncertainty.

Recent years have seen a range of high-profile whistleblower disclosures of such gray areas in security surveillance (Edward Snowden and the NSA), tax evasion (the Panama and Paradise Papers), and digital political profiling (Christopher Wylie and Cambridge Analytica). The realities laid bare by Snowden’s disclosures in 2013 of the NSA’s surveillance program drew strong criticism from the entire political spectrum. The indignant response from citizen groups and U.S. congresspersons and the international outcry from the EU testified to how much citizens and lawmakers lagged behind the advanced use of digital data by security services in the post-9/11 period. The extensive data collection Snowden disclosed had grown up inside the legal frameworks that appeared across the Western world following 9/11. The NSA’s collection of data had a legal anchoring in Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which came into effect after 9/11 and contained extensive opportunities to monitor citizen behavior through the harvesting of phone call data.

Snowden’s concerns were not so much about the narrow legality of the practices but, rather, whether they were creating new gray areas, pushing legal boundaries beyond their original intention, and violating the Fourth Amendment (Snowden 2019). About one year after Snowden’s disclosures, the House of Representatives led initiatives to overhaul the NSA and the entire post-9/11 security and surveillance regime. U.S. politicians reacted under strong pressure from civil society organizations and citizens who had rapidly formed coalitions such as Restore the Fourth and Stop Watching US.

Just a few years after Snowden, whistleblower disclosures once again exposed significant steering deficits and gray areas in contemporary democracies. The past five to six years have seen continuous disclosures of tax havens and other aggressive tax avoidance policies. Most notably, the Luxembourg Leaks (2014) and Panama (2016) and Paradise (2017) Papers have unleashed millions of documents describing a world of extensive and sophisticated networks engaged in systematic tax avoidance. All these events were initiated by whistleblowers: Deltour in the case of the Luxembourg Leaks and anonymous whistleblowers in the case of the Panama and Paradise Papers. Tax havens are, in many ways, the quintessential gray area in the modern world (Urry 2014). Tax havens are specific territories with lenient taxation policies, often existing within the jurisdiction of sovereign states or autonomous British Overseas Territories (Palan, Murphy, and Chavagneux 2010). Tax evasion was hardly a new discovery, but the scale revealed by the Panama and Paradise Papers took citizens and lawmakers aback. The European Parliament’s establishment of the Special Committee on Financial Crimes, Tax Evasion and Tax Avoidance on March 1, 2018, was explicitly motivated by these cases and by the observation that “existing tax rules are often unable to keep up with the increasing speed of the economy” (Special Committee on Financial Crimes, Tax Evasion and Tax Avoidance 2018).

In a study conducted for the European Parliament, Hadzhieva (2019:17) underlined the gray character of tax evasion in a digital era: “[T]he fact that a business can be virtually conducted without any physical presence poses one of the main policy challenges.” As a result, the report states, it is increasingly “difficult to determine the jurisdiction eligible for taxation . . . as assets and activities . . . can easily move across jurisdictions.” These dynamics create expansive gray areas for tax authorities and, consequently, new opportunities for actors who intend their operations to go under the radar of democratic accountability (Urry 2014). When Deltour blew the whistle on Luxembourg’s tax deals for multinational corporations in 2014, he felt he had to step forward precisely to reveal practices that, in his view, were “widely unknown, especially in terms of scale” (Chenoweth 2014).

In 2018, Christopher Wylie, a former employee at Cambridge Analytica (Wylie quit in 2014), disclosed how that corporation had extracted citizens’ Facebook data to aid political campaigns, especially on the populist right. Wylie, a more or less self-taught computer and IT specialist, had helped set up Cambridge Analytica around the idea of harvesting citizen and consumer data for political purposes. Beginning in 2013, he and Cambridge Analytica began collaborating with Steve Bannon, editor at the time of Breitbart and later chief strategist in Trump’s presidential campaign, and Robert Mercer, a computer scientist and billionaire CEO with a record of financially supporting right-wing agendas in the United States, including as the top donor of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Through a mix of illegal and sanctioned methods, Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of more than 87 million Facebook users. The political relevance of this process was built around a path-breaking article by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel (2013) with the telling title, “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.” Equipped with the trail of data people leave behind when they use Facebook, Cambridge Analytica was able to build personal profiles that allowed the Trump and UK Leave campaigns to target voters with unprecedented precision (Cadwalladr 2018).

The Cambridge Analytica disclosure revealed how the data we give off float around in a vast gray area beyond our control and, importantly, beyond the oversight of authorities. The profound democratic steering problems unraveled by Christopher Wylie were evident in the flurry of political hearings and commissions in the wake of the revelations. In three hearings in the European Parliament over June and July 2018, MEPs expressed shock at the gray areas laid bare by the disclosures. The hearings demonstrated that the unregulated privatization of economically and politically useful personal information had advanced at such a pace that lawmakers and authorities inevitably became reactive rather than proactive. The data we constantly produce online constitutes a new kind of raw resource for exploitation (Cohen 2018; Couldry and Mejias 2019), which, despite legislation attempts such as the General Data Protection Regulation and because of its ephemeral and invisible nature, is likely to remain a gray area of democratic regulation.

These three cases differ on a number of counts, but they all demonstrate democracy’s autonomy dilemma: They share, in other words, the fact that whistleblowers exposed problematic and systematic practices that had developed within autopoietic systems and organizations (Luhmann 1995) and existed largely outside the public and democratic gaze. My emphasis here on systematic practices allows us to distinguish these types of disclosures from those that expose more particular wrongdoing. The opening example of Donald Trump and the Ukraine phone call is a case in point. It is easy to suspect similar cases of wrongdoing by Trump, but the disclosure itself was nonetheless particular in nature because it pertained to a specific event rather than a systematic, structural practice.

What also sets the Trump incident apart from the cases discussed previously is the legislative apparatus surrounding it. The Ukraine whistleblower used established channels stipulated in the U.S. Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 (ICWPA) and, as a result, set in motion a political-legal chain of reactions that followed a set of preestablished procedures and regulations around the behavior of U.S. presidents and other people with political authority. As discussed earlier, such frameworks were absent or underdeveloped in the Edward Snowden, Christopher Wylie, and Panama/Paradise disclosures. These basic distinctions suggest whistleblower disclosures can follow quite different trajectories with varying democratic effects. Table 2 outlines four basic types of democratic effects based on whether the wrongdoing is particular or systematic and whether there are clear legal-democratic frameworks in place to address and sanction it.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Types of Whistleblower Disclosures and Their Democratic Effects.

	Existing legal and democratic framework	Uncertain legal and democratic framework
Particular wrongdoing	The wrongdoing can reasonably be attributed to a particular individual or group within an organization. There is a relatively clear legal framework within which the wrongdoing can be addressed. Debate will primarily be restricted to issues regarding evidence, sanctions, and culpability.	The wrongdoing can reasonably be attributed to a particular individual or group within an organization. There is uncertainty about legality/illegality and jurisdictional responsibility. Debate will primarily concern how/whether the particular wrongdoing can be addressed within existing legal/democratic contexts.
Systematic wrongdoing	The wrongdoing has a systematic character that involves practices across entire organizations or professions. There is a relatively clear legal framework within which the wrongdoing can be addressed. If the wrongdoing is viewed as systematic, debate will consider the need for revising legal frameworks and mechanisms of democratic oversight.	The wrongdoing has a systematic character that involves practices across entire organizations or professions. There is uncertainty about legality/illegality and jurisdictional responsibility. Debate is substantial and attains a moral-political character that gravitates around the need to establish new legal frameworks and mechanisms of democratic oversight.

If we return to the models of competitive and deliberative democracy, we can roughly place the former toward the upper-left side of Table 2 and the latter toward the lower-right. In cases where legal frameworks and democratic mechanisms are in place, the information provided by whistleblowers primarily becomes resources in individual decision-making. Where no such frameworks exist or where considerable uncertainty is prevalent, disclosures are more likely to initiate political deliberation seeking to understand the nature of the wrongdoing and establish new democratic oversight mechanisms. These types are, of course, ideal-typical, and it may be difficult to unambiguously place specific instances of whistleblowing in any one of them. I contend, however, that the cases I briefly summarized here all approximate the lower-right part of Table 2. Because it is here that democracy’s autonomy dilemma appears in its most acute form, this part of Table 2 is also where whistleblower disclosures have the most profound and lasting effect on society.

Conclusion and Discussion

Whistleblowers have a sui generis place in contemporary democracies. In this article, I have sought to demonstrate how this position is closely tied to what I call democracy’s autonomy dilemma. Democracies are built around an advanced differentiation (Luhmann 1995), which is premised on autonomy. The separation of powers and functions only makes sense if professions, systems, and organizations are able to work according to their own norms, logics, and codes. The autonomy dilemma arises because this autopoiesis carries with it a risk of introversion and blindness, which, potentially, can turn into wrongdoing when codes are perverted or taken to their extreme. Differentiation, in other words, is a necessary aspect of complex, democratic societies, but it comes with a series of dangers, risks, and challenges. In a broader historical perspective, these challenges have been addressed by a politics of disclosure. This drive, which has its roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, insists that system and organization autonomy must remain porous and incomplete: Boundaries need to be constantly transgressed to detect and rectify wrongdoing. Democratic societies are characterized by harboring a plethora of actors and procedures whose raison d’être is transgression, scrutiny, and critique. Investigative journalists, political activists, and advocacy groups are among the most prominent actors in this politics of disclosure.

I have attempted to situate the whistleblower within this broader democratic landscape. In doing so, I argued that whistleblowers have important historical and philosophical affinities with these other actors, but they cannot simply be seen as a subset to them. Their place in the politics of disclosure is sui generis because of their privileged insider position within the very organizations they subject to public scrutiny and critique. I have tried to argue that this peculiar point of departure creates a range of challenges, precarities, and consequences that are unique to this type of action. These stem from the fact that external whistleblowing entails a conversion and transferal of loyalty, away from one’s organization and collective and toward society and its citizens. The whistleblower is the only actor in our societies who transgresses from the inside to achieve prosocial and public interest goals.

Seen in this way, the emergence of whistleblowing as an action repertoire represents a significant shift in the character of democracy. Whistleblowing as a concept was not coined and the practice not given definitive shape as a distinct and legitimate democratic action repertoire until the early 1970s. This period witnessed a reformulation of the politics of disclosure, where critical actors were gradually given more room to transgress boundaries to detect wrongdoing. This new situation reflected a cultural and political change in citizens’ deference to authority and a growing realization that democratic, regulatory mechanisms were increasingly unable to secure justice and accountability in all domains of social and political life. The whistleblower entered the scene as part of broader claims about the need for more critical, citizen-driven intervention but also in reflection of the limits to what can be achieved through scrutiny from the outside by, for example, journalists, activists, and lawmakers. Whistleblowing, in other words, radically expanded the boundaries of the politics of disclosure. Today, whistleblowers continue to have their most profound effect in regard to gray areas where wrongdoing has gone under the democratic radar and where it has often acquired a normalized character that is difficult to detect from the outside. The recent cases of Edward Snowden (NSA), Christopher Wylie (Cambridge Analytica), and the Panama and Paradise Papers are primary exemplars of the power of whistleblowers to disclose normalized wrongdoing and initiate debate around democratic gray areas.

Far from solving democracy’s autonomy dilemma, whistleblowing has added new complexities to it. Invoking a theme that would accompany democracy through the next centuries, and which is reaching a crescendo today, Bentham (1838–1843) admitted long ago that the regime of publicity is in essence a system of distrust. This is, however, a necessary price to pay because, as Bentham (1838–1843:314) asks rhetorically, “Whom ought we to distrust, if not those to whom is committed great authority, with great temptations to abuse it?” Since Bentham, democracies have developed a permanent preoccupation with invisibility and secrecy (Dean 2001; Horn 2011; Thompson 2000), a systematic suspicion of wrongdoing, which, as I argued, is linked with differentiation in a mutually productive manner. This is perhaps one of the most delicate balances in our democracies and one where whistleblowers (but also journalists, activists, and other monitorial actors) are at the front line.

The emphasis on scrutiny has deep democratic roots (Keane 2018; Rosanvallon 2008), but as I have tried to argue here, there is no doubt that the quest for visibility is accelerating. Whistleblowers are an essential part of this process and one that moves closer to the center of the democratic process as more countries adopt legislation to protect whistleblowing. In recent years, the most ambitious effort in this direction has come from the EU. As of 2020, all EU countries are required to adopt whistleblower legislation (European Parliament 2019). With the extension of whistleblower legislation, the costs associated with the practice are lowered. This is a definite democratic advance, but it exposes an inherent dilemma in the relationship between publicity and democracy: The constant exposure of secrets, backstage practices, and gray areas risks producing distrust and cynicism among citizens (Dean 2001; Rosanvallon 2008).

In Foucault’s (2011:77) treatment of the Greek origins of the concept of parrhesia, he details its democratic ambiguities: “Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead the citizenry into tyranny, or may otherwise endanger the city. Hence parrhesia may be dangerous for democracy itself.” This concern obviously applies to the discussion of free speech in general and, not least, to how this debate has been made newly acute by the unrestricted access to the public sphere provided by social media (Bennett and Livingston 2018). This, of course, is not an argument for restriction or contraction of parrhesia (or whistleblowing), but an identification of its sometimes ambiguous and delicate nature. What these observations underline for the discussion here is the need for a steady hand when we think about the place of whistleblowers in democracy. This would include a clear theoretical vocabulary for distinguishing between whistleblowing and adjacent field-transgressing practices such as leaking and hacking (see Table 1) and a systematic understanding of how and when whistleblowers make a democratic difference (see Table 2). If we cannot formulate theoretically sound answers to these questions, those who are otherwise positively inclined toward whistleblowing will be in a weaker position to defend it. Just as importantly, theoretical uncertainty leaves a blank space where detractors can “pollute” whistleblowers in ways that repress and place them outside the framework of legitimate democratic intervention. As I argued, the whistleblower’s insider position can entail great power, but it is also a precarious position vulnerable to character and defamation attacks.

I hope my discussions have offered some steps to not only advance a new theoretical agenda in political sociology but also to establish a firmer ground for tackling some of the normative questions that continue to surround whistleblowing. Such an effort is important because whistleblowing, in my analysis, is likely to become more prevalent in the future. Recent data from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (2019) demonstrate a sharp rise in whistleblower tips, from around 3,000 in 2012 to more than 5,000 in 2019, which is clearly indicative of rising levels of whistleblower willingness among today’s employees. In Europe, as noted earlier, the EU has launched a new complex of ambitious whistleblower legislation, which will be transposed across member states over the coming years.

These trends obviously have many causes but must be considered, I argue, within the broader context of rising levels of knowledge and sophistication in human production, technology, and organization that I discussed as central to the emergence of whistleblowing as a distinct practice in the 1960s and 1970s. In the current situation, this is perhaps most notable in the fast-paced digitalization of contemporary societies (Olesen 2020). Table 2 pointed to a variety of ways whistleblowers can have political and democratic effects, but as discussed, whistleblower effects are most profound and consequential in regard to normalized wrongdoing and gray areas. Of course, digitalization is not the only producer of normalized wrongdoing and gray areas, but it is one of the most complex and challenging ones. Big data patterns can be extracted from the digital traces consumers and citizens leave behind and utilized for commercial and political ends without individuals’ knowledge or consent, and commodities, assets, and money attain an immaterial form that challenges existing procedures and frameworks to monitor and govern them. The cases of Edward Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, and the Panama/Paradise Papers are in their different ways exemplars of how digitalization produces new invisibilities that escape legal jurisdiction and democratic oversight. It is no coincidence that whistleblowing seems to proliferate under these conditions. This rising productive and organizational complexity, which is partly driven by information and communications technology, is difficult for outsiders (including journalists, political activists, and lawmakers) to fully track and comprehend. With their privileged access inside these gray areas, employees-turned-whistleblowers are likely to become increasingly important initiators of democratic deliberation about the future of our societies.

It is not least for this reason that a primary ambition here was to show how whistleblowers on the one hand are sui generis actors in democracy but also how their interventions and ethe constantly come into contact with other actors and institutions in democratic societies. I hope the discussions I offered can be received as an invitation to sociological specialists in other areas of politics and democracy (e.g., the public sphere, journalism, social movements, political institutions) to establish theoretical dialogues with whistleblowing research. As I noted at the beginning, such exchange has so far been surprisingly absent. This article has succeeded if it provides at least some inspiration and direction for how such an agenda can be advanced. As should be clear, this is about much more than simply coloring up a new part of the map. Rather, I hope the discussion has been sufficiently generative to suggest how other areas of political sociology might find a potential for further theoretical refinement in the engagement with a sociology of whistleblowing.