Networks of Interlocking Leaders: Exploring the Links and Identifying the Elites in four European countries

This chapter aims at analysing the inter-organisational networks emerging from interlocking leaders among the most resourceful, national-level civil society organisations (CSOs) in four European countries. By comparing four different country contexts, we analyse differences in the characteristics of networks, find different mechanisms that seem to structure organisational links across the cases, and identify who the most powerful actors are based on the CSOs’ network positions. While we find small components of tightly connected organisations in the Italian and Polish cases, mainly around similar policy areas, these contexts are characterised by overall fragmentation. In Sweden and in the UK, on the other hand, we find that there are a handful of key CSOs that link the majority of the resourceful organisations, thus occupying powerful network positions.