Author
Snijders, Tom
Tubaro, Paola
Mounier, Lise
Lazega, Emmanuel
Type
Communication / Conférence
Abstract (EN)
The paper is part of a larger research project using advice network data from a longitudinal study of the
Commercial Court of Paris, a judicial institution whose members are volunteering businesspeople,
elected by their peers for a fixed-term mandate. Relying on the stochastic actor-based model of Snijders
(2001), and the SIENA software (Snijders et al 2009), we focus on the respective effects of adherence
to norms and status factors on shaping the dynamics of this social network.
The paper builds on our previous results on these issues (Lazega et al. 2008, Lazega et al. 2010), and
proposes a more complex SIENA model specification, also taking into account the changing
composition of the Court with joiners and leavers every year, and an additional set of variables on
Chamber membership and judges’ normative orientations. This information is combined with data on
members’ heterogeneities deriving from their professional and educational diversity. We thereby aim to
shed light on the extent to which network dynamics and in particular, norm-driven selection of advisors
may result from the internal functioning rules of the Court rather than from outside influences.
Our results confirm that network dynamics tends to closely follow the formal structure of the Court, while
normative attitudes hardly drive the evolution of this network. However, norms and organizational rules
have a differential impact depending on members’ individual backgrounds and Chamber membership
experiences.