EBS Professor Jukka Mäkinen presents research on Big Tech and democratic backsliding at Harvard

On 6 October, EBS Professor of Business Ethics Jukka Veikko Mäkinen and University of Gothenburg Professor Juho Lindman presented their in-progress research, “Big Tech and Backsliding Liberal Democracies,” at a SCANCOR seminar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Lindman, Professor of Information Systems at the University of Gothenburg, is spending the year 2026 at Harvard as SCANCOR visiting scholar. Mäkinen, who co-leads the Business in Society Knowledge Team at Estonian Business School, held the same visiting position there in 2019 together with Lindman.

The new project builds on their earlier work. In 2023, with Professor Emeritus of Finance Eero Kasanen from Aalto University, they published “Big Tech’s Power, Political Corporate Social Responsibility and Regulation” in the Journal of Information Technology, which received the journal’s Best Paper Prize. The article examined the political power exercised by major technology companies and the difficulty of regulating it, while the Harvard presentation carries the argument into the study of democratic backsliding.

Democratic backsliding is usually associated with political leaders who weaken courts, undermine elections, or restrict opposition. Mäkinen and Lindman ask whether democracy can also be eroded more gradually, through the economic and institutional power of technology companies. “We normally think of democratic backsliding as something done by populist leaders,” Mäkinen explains. “Our point is that it can also come from concentrated economic power backed by new technologies.”

Political equality beyond the right to vote

The argument draws on John Rawls’ idea of the fair value of political liberties. Citizens in a liberal democracy may hold the same formal rights to vote, speak, and take part in politics, but those rights say little about whether they have a comparable chance of influencing decisions. Where wealth, ownership, and institutional control are highly concentrated, some private actors can have far more political influence than others, and technology firms now control infrastructure that governments, businesses, and citizens all rely on.

“When technology firms become large enough, their economic power turns easily into political power (and vice versa),” Mäkinen says. “They shape the agenda, the rules that govern them, and the information environment citizens rely on. This happens quietly and from inside existing institutions.”

Rawls also held that the background conditions of a just democracy do not maintain themselves. They need continuous institutional maintenance, which Mäkinen calls institutional moral labour. As new forms of economic power appear, societies need to ask whether their institutions still protect the political equality that they were designed to secure.

Why the question matters now

The AI boom has made computing infrastructure a strategic asset, and states now compete to host it by offering energy, land, grid capacity, and subsidies. Google’s €13 billion investment in Finland is a recent example. In Finland, the public discussion has centred on what Mäkinen calls the “electricity bill,” meaning energy use, jobs, and waste heat. Questions about who owns the infrastructure, what business model public policy is supporting, and who captures the value created are far less often raised, even though the assets are foreign-owned, the tax revenue is modest, and most of the value ends up elsewhere.

The same pattern may appear in regulation. The EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act have become, in Mäkinen’s words, “a point of transatlantic conflict, with Big Tech and US political power pushing back.” Given how close the ties between the US government and the major technology firms have become, the relationship between corporate power and the stability of liberal democracy has rarely been more topical.

Two cases, two expressions of the same power

The researchers chose two cases that lie outside the usual debate about social media and misinformation, which they see as too narrow. The first concerns hyperscale data centres in the Nordic countries, including Google’s facility in Hamina, Finland, and Meta’s in Luleå, Sweden. States compete to host these facilities, and the competition strengthens the position of companies that can compare jurisdictions and invest elsewhere. The second concerns EU regulation, where it seems that Big Tech and its home state contest democratically adopted rules through lobbying, strategic litigation, and transatlantic political pressure.

“Together the cases show two sides of the same power,” Mäkinen points out. “It shapes the conditions under which democratic states make decisions, as when they bid to host infrastructure, and it contests those decisions once they are made, as with the EU’s rules.”

Four routes from corporate power to political influence

Drawing on these cases, Mäkinen and Lindman identify four main channels through which Big Tech’s economic position can affect democratic institutions:

1. Agenda-setting and regulatory influence: lobbying, litigation, and the movement of personnel between firms and government shape which issues receive attention and how regulation is designed.
2. Bargaining power and exit options: firms can play jurisdictions against each other, so states end up competing to offer the best terms.
3. State dependence on private infrastructure: when governments rely on corporate cloud, AI, and communications systems, public power is increasingly exercised through private contracts that escape the normal constitutional checks.
4. Control of the information environment: platforms shape what citizens see and discuss.

“The common feature is that power moves out of the channels where liberal democratic accountability normally applies,” Mäkinen says.

What’s next?

The research is now being developed into two papers. The first is aimed at an information systems audience, while the second addresses political scientists interested in democratic backsliding. Mäkinen presented that work at the European International Studies Association’s Pan-European Conference in Lisbon shortly before the Harvard seminar. Feedback from both events is encouraging the authors to continue their line of research. 

The visit also carried personal significance for Mäkinen. “Harvard is a place where the classics are still very much alive,” he says. “Rawls taught there for decades, and I have worked with his papers in the Harvard University archives. Presenting a Rawlsian argument short walk from where he developed his theory, to an audience that knows that tradition intimately, pushes you to state the argument more precisely and to see new connections.”