Normative Homophily, Relational Turnover and Organizational Structure: the Case of the Commercial Court of Paris

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