How digital platforms, data infrastructures, and algorithmic systems redistribute power among companies, governments, and international institutions.
Longstanding dynamics of private influence are reappearing in new technological forms. Major technology firms and other providers of algorithmic and financial technologies increasingly influence how public problems are defined and governed. This strand brings together two established areas of my research, corporate influence and global economic governance. In practice, I examine how digital platforms, data infrastructures, and algorithmic systems redistribute authority among public and private actors.
- SEE-TECH, Seeing Like a Tech Firm: Advocacy in the Era of Platform Capitalism (2024–2028), and BIT-EU, Big Tech and the EU. SEE-TECH, funded through a Research Council of Finland Academy Research Fellowship, examines how major technology firms coordinate political advocacy across the EU policy cycle. The project follows influence from agenda formation in national capitals through legislation and implementation in Brussels and the Member States, as well as the international diffusion of EU digital rules. It builds on BIT-EU, funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, which examines the influence of major technology companies on policymaking in the EU and beyond.
- ”Big Tech’s Power Resources: Four Eras of Corporate Influence in the EU”, forthcoming at Socio-Economic Review. The article examines how Big Tech’s influence in the EU has evolved since the 1990s and how control over digital platforms and algorithms has reshaped advocacy in Brussels. It identifies four overlapping eras of corporate influence, each characterised by a distinct bundle of conventional and digital power resources.
- Reconceptualising the Brussels Effect (Journal of Common Market Studies, 2026). The first major publication of the SEE-TECH project revises prevailing accounts of the EU’s global regulatory influence by bringing corporate power and political contestation into the analysis. Drawing on the concepts of instrumental, structural, and hybrid power, it examines how corporate lobbying and third-country influence can weaken, redirect, or obstruct the global diffusion of EU rules.
- Digital Statehood and Crypto Governance, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Widening Fellowship, Tallinn University of Technology (2020–2022). The fellowship examined the political economy of digital statehood and financial technology. One strand focused on Estonia’s e-Residency programme and the commercialisation of state-issued residency-related rights. Another resulted in a co-authored article with Ringa Raudla and Milan Babić on crypto governance, examining how regulatory arrangements emerge through interactions among public institutions, crypto firms, financial actors, and transnational initiatives. Together, this work explored the changing boundary between public authority and privately operated digital infrastructures. The resulting article, From tax havens to cryptocurrencies: secrecy-seeking capital in the global economy, was published at Review of International Political Economy.
- To sandbox or not to sandbox? Diverging strategies of regulatory responses to FinTech (Regulation & Governance, with Ringa Raudla, Egert Juuse, Vytautas Kuokštis, and Aleksandrs Cepilovs, 2025). This comparative study examines the political, legal, administrative, and economic factors that explain why governments adopt, or decide not to adopt, regulatory sandboxes for financial technology.