The paper discusses the methodological virtues and pitfalls of social network analysis tools to study appointment policies and court legitimacy in new democracies. Legitimacy enables constitutional courts to facilitate or even foster democratic consolidation. In countries with a strong clientelistic legacy, public perceptions of the fair representation of societal and political groups on the bench may matter more for legitimacy than professional qualifications. Thus, the paper uses original social data for politicians and judges in new democracies, in particular Benin, to demonstrate that changing network structures indeed coincide with patterns of legitimacy and how SNA helps to identify the parts of the social network that matter most. SNA, for example, questions the role of ethno-regional networks in Benin, often seen to be predominant in African politics, and points to short-term political affiliations to explain court legitimacy. However, issues of data availability and measurement validity have to be addressed.
