Spiders of democracy: The local (para)democratic elite

Abstract A supply of multiple different arenas of democratic participation at all levels and in all spheres of society has been viewed as a guarantee of a healthy democracy. At the same time, the professionalization and individualization of politics and the withering away of traditional voluntary civic life promote the centralization and accumulation of power in democracies. Based on the results of a network analysis of 4,141 elected members and their overlapping memberships in various governmental and non-governmental democratic institutions in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, this paper identifies and describes a group of 87 highly networked “spiders” in the local democratic elite. Through an engagement with the postwar pluralism–elitism debate, the paper argues that a plurality of democratic institutions, while in principle allowing for the participation of more people in decision-making, also ends up producing a network-based elite located between different democratic institutions and their local and national levels.