Features of Governments and Economies

First, I contend that more institutionalized tribal governments have better tools for building and deploying expertise. We find smart, hard-working leaders across all levels of institutionalization. I join others in arguing, however, that institutionalized governments best cultivate, utilize, and sustain individual talents and best retain and disseminate best practices. Generalists face serious performance constraints because they wear many hats and function in less routine ways.

Cornell and Kalt (Reference Cornell and Kalt1992) have stressed repeatedly that institutions matter for effective tribal governments. Specifically, they have directed attention to the importance of “rules and procedures that delegate and delimit authority.” They remark, “No society of significant size can count solely on the goodwill of its leaders and citizens” (21; see also Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development 2008). We find these same themes in Polsby's (Reference Polsby1968) work on political institutionalization. Polsby specifies three key features of institutionalization: (1) structures that are well bounded and differentiated, (2) complexity and specialization, and (3) universalistic, automatic rules. He continues, “the total impact of a cadre of specialists operating over the entire spectrum of public policies is a formidable asset for a political institution.” (166) Along the same lines, Stinchcombe (Reference Stinchcombe1990) argued that, where there is differentiation of tasks, workers can more easily understand their environments and promote innovation.

We find routinization, differentiation, and specialization in the traditions of both indigenous and Western governments. For example, Biolsi (Reference Biolsi1992), drawing on Wissler (Reference Wissler1912, 7–11) and Walker (Reference Walker1982), documents the distinct roles for decision-making in mid–nineteenth century Oglala Lakota society. He describes how the naca ominicia, a body composed of most older men, selected seven wicaśa it'ancan (men chiefs) to serve lifelong, usually hereditary terms. Those seven then selected four others to oversee hunting and campsites. Another body that served one-year terms then appointed akicita it'ancan (soldier chiefs), who in turn appointed a police force (35–36). Even if certain institutions today are borrowed from Westerners, it does not mean those particular practices are incompatible with traditional values. As Alfred (Reference Alfred1999, 3) notes, “[m]ost acknowledge that all Native structures will have to incorporate modern administrative techniques and technologies.” Rather, Alfred argues, the distinction between indigenous and European-derived governments lies in features such as the role of government in society and the nature of the consent of the governed.

Second, I evaluate whether well-established economic development matters. Here, I argue that an infusion of funds makes it easier to build up expert capacity by allowing tribes to bring in additional staff or new programs. Tribal economic development almost always takes the form of tribally owned and operated enterprises. Simply put, independent funds generated by these enterprises make it easier for tribes to support governmental activities.Footnote ⁸

In short, for generally underresourced groups, we ought to expect to see some advantages flow from obtaining perhaps the most fungible resource of all—money. The question, however, is exactly how money can have an impact. Hall and Deardorff (Reference Hall and Deardorff2006) suggest that information improves when budget constraints are loosened, and their argument implies that a better-funded interest group can do more to redress its allies’ information limitations. It seems reasonable to expect this for tribal governments as well.

Economic development, in this respect, is notable precisely because it provides an independent resource. As one Pacific Northwest tribal council member described it in 1999, one of the chief advantages of tribal economic development was that it generated funds “not subject to interference from well-placed political Indian fighters.” Much of the social movement literature has documented the perils that can arise if resource-constrained actors become dependent on outsiders (McAdam Reference McAdam1982; Morris Reference Morris1984). More economically developed tribes can more easily avert such perils. In sum, I expect economic development to influence outcomes because it produces a potentially flexible and independent resource. Furthermore, if expertise matters in politics, economic development should nurture governments that better understand their environments and display more sophisticated strategic calculations.

Features of Governments and Economies Operationalized

I identified government institutionalization and economic development in the following ways.Footnote ⁹ To identify the six tribes with stronger economic bases, I looked for reservations with very profitable economic development enterprises. Most commonly, these enterprises were extensive natural resources extraction operations (four of the six tribes selected) and/or large casinos (three of the six). Four tribes had notable commercial development—such as resorts, shopping centers, other retail services, and manufacturing—but typically, commercial development was preceded (and presumably funded to a degree) by natural resources extraction or casinos.

The sources of information about tribal governments are far from uniform. I turned to documentation for a variety of indicators of institutionalization:Footnote ¹⁰ (1) All six tribes showed functional specialization within tribal government. (2) Five tribes were praised by outside observers for units within the tribal government with specialized, effective skills. (3) For four tribes, the number of tribal employees was much larger than for the other tribes in the sample. (4) For four tribes, staff had played leadership roles in intertribal organizations. (5) Departments within several of the tribes have received recognition such as Honoring Nations awards from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. (6) All six tribes received funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] (1992–1999) in ways that suggested more effective governments. If tribes are willing and able to operate their own government programs, they can opt into certain BIA grants. Four tribes received especially large grants from the BIA. Three tribes persuaded the BIA to allocate funding through block grant programs, including the Consolidated Tribal Government Program and the Self Government Compacts.

I identified less institutionalized governments by the following features.Footnote ¹¹)1) All six tribes lacked the following traits in the early 1990s: functional specialization, large staffs, key roles in intertribal organizations, programs that won prominent awards, and Self Government Compacts from the BIA. (2) Two tribes received federal recognition fairly recently, which meant that their governments were less experienced at key tasks. (3) Four of the reservations had populations of less than 200 people. With such a small population, it is hard to justify staffing beyond a handful of people, which of course then makes specialization and differentiation impractical.Footnote ¹² (4) The BIA has guidelines for minimal budgets for tribal governments to sustain basic operations (Bureau of Indian Affairs 1998, BIA–60). Two tribes were below that threshold and two were only slightly above it. (5) For two tribes, I found praise of the tribal government by outside observers, but that praise centered on particular personalities and not on organizations or structures.

Why would any tribe end up with a developed economy but a less institutionalized government, or alternatively, a highly institutionalized government but a less developed economy? The easiest cases to explain are institutionalized governments with constrained economies. All three tribes in these circumstances face disadvantages of geography. None sits atop highly profitable natural resources. None is very close to metropolitan areas or busy interstates, which means they lack a customer base for a highly profitable casino. All have fostered multiple economic development initiatives—such as small-scale natural resource extraction, agriculture, casinos, retail services, and programs to help tribal artists. These initiatives generated jobs for tribal members, but none generated large revenue surpluses for tribal government.

How does a tribe end up with a developed economy but a less institutionalized government? In at least one case, the tribal government had only recently been recognized by the federal government, which meant that tribal leaders began the 1990s still trying to hammer out basic operations. In two cases, very small tribal populations resulted in governments with very small staffs, making it more difficult to specialize and differentiate. In all three cases, flourishing economic activities were relatively more recent developments. As the 1990s unfolded, tribes with economic advantages but less institutionalized governments invested in their governments. By the final years of the sample, at least two tribes initiated programs that would go on to receive prominent awards as they matured and at least two of the tribes had staff with roles in intertribal organizations. At least two tribes won federal funding that was more and/or more flexible. Yet institutionalization can be a slow process, and these tribal governments changed gradually.

County Hostility toward Tribes

I argue that expertise's undoing lies with the related dynamics of racial conflict and organizational exhaustion. To consider the sources of expertise's undoing, I turn attention first to Indian–White conflict, its roots, and its consequences. Indian–White conflict is pervasive, and I identify some circumstances where it may be more intense and thus more draining. I expect that in settings with entangled Indian and non-Indian lands, conflict should be greatest and most taxing.

There is ample anecdotal evidence that tribal–local relations are plagued generally by hostility toward tribal governments and American Indians. Ashley and Hubbard (Reference Ashley and Hubbard2004) illustrate how some counties have resisted recognizing tribal governments as legitimate sovereigns. There are further examples from government documents and newspaper coverage of tribal–local relations in the 1990s for the regions that I analyze in this article. In one case from the Southwest, a newspaper ran the following coverage. In a first article, the county sheriff announced that he was cutting off law enforcement and emergency response to the reservation to “hold out for compensation for his department's services.” The editor's column the next day did not raise concerns about the potential public safety consequences of such political brinksmanship. Rather, the column attacked the tribe over water-use negotiations. The tribe was developing some new businesses and wanted to secure more access to water. As the newspaper's editor saw those negotiations, the tribe had decided to “hold hostage” the wider community: “In other words, the [tribal] negotiators are saying ‘You give us exactly what we are asking for in order for us to destroy your business community’ . . . [Tribal officials], true to form, are refusing to return phone calls. . . .” In a case from the Pacific Northwest, in a discussion of a tribe's new casino, a county commissioner remarked caustically,

The commissioner's statement contains a long series of factual errors, beyond his reference to “so called” sovereign nations. Tribal casinos are subject to regulations and taxes—although clearly not the kind of regulations and taxes that this county commissioner would prefer.

In such examples of tribal interactions with counties, the non-Indian officials that the tribes faced did not simply have different preferences or priorities. Some officials and community leaders held pronounced hostility toward the very enterprise of tribal government. Beyond these dilemmas of general prejudice, however, there is good reason to give special attention to one classic source of Indian–White conflict: the extent to which land within reservation boundaries is “checkerboarded.” In some regions, federal policy in the late nineteenth century resulted in private ownership of land tracts within reservation boundaries by nontribal members. Since then, this entanglement of interests has fueled political, economic, and social conflict (Biolsi Reference Biolsi2001). Checkerboarding is rare in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest but relatively commonplace in the Upper Plains.

There is compelling evidence that entangled land leads to angry, bitter, and fearful clashes. Bobo and Tuan (Reference Biolsi2006) find such patterns in Indian–White conflict over fishing rights on the Great Lakes. In much the same way, the evidence suggests that politics in the Upper Plains, where checkerboarding is most pronounced, are poisoned by negative attitudes about American Indians as a people. There are few survey data on racial attitudes in the region, with the exception of one study in the mid-1980s (Peterson Reference Peterson1987). On key questions, typically one-fifth to one-fourth of respondents expressed negative attitudes about American Indians.Footnote ¹³

There is other evidence of racial hostility in the Upper Plains as well. In a newspaper based in one largely white community within a reservation's boundaries, a county official wrote a letter opposing candidates for state and local office with ties to tribal government and calling for “representatives who will protect the constitutional rights of all parties concerned, not those who will help strip those rights away from the citizens.” The implicit contrast suggested is that only those without ties to tribal government “will protect the constitutional rights,” whereas those with such ties “will help strip those rights” from (white) citizens. On another occasion, some white locals described disputes with tribal government as “explosive” and “about ready to blow.” Soon thereafter, the paper published a column calling on the community “to finally set aside our jealousies, gossip, envies, distrust, and assumptions so we can hash out our land disputes, our jurisdictional concerns and our sovereignty issues.” There are other contemporaneous, well-publicized examples from the Upper Plains. Perhaps most notably, a county official at a public meeting in the early 1990s described American Indian culture as “mongrelized,” “primitive,” and “a culture of hopelessness, godlessness, joblessness and lawlessness” (“Slam of Indians Challenged” 1990). In this same time period, a number of cases from the criminal justice system provoked well-publicized outrage and charges of differential treatment of Indians (South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Human Rights 2000).

I suggest that racial conflict fueled by checkerboarding creates unique difficulties for tribes’ effectiveness in intergovernmental relations in the Upper Plains. There are serious reasons, however, to think that American Indian tribal governments’ travails in the Upper Plains—and indeed, in other parts of the country as well—are not due to only the contemporary challenges that checkerboarding creates. A number of analysts have expressed concern that with the mismatch between pre-existing social institutions and the formal governing institutions on reservations that were designed by the U.S. government in the early twentieth century, tribal governments descended deeply into incompetence and corruption (see, for example, Biolsi Reference Biolsi1992 and Cornell and Kalt Reference Cornell and Kalt1992). Concerns about institutional mismatch and resulting governance problems are not specific to the Upper Plains (see also Alfred Reference Alfred1999; Deloria and Lytle Reference Deloria and Lytle1984; O'Brien Reference O'Brien1989), but some of the most striking examples are drawn from that region.

There is no doubt that history matters. I focus on contemporary obstacles, however, for multiple reasons. First, even a corrupt or venal official would have incentives to learn how to interact effectively with other governments, in order to capture power and finances. Also, contemporary circumstances—such as the present-day conflicts around checkerboarding—can exacerbate underlying historical vulnerabilities. To their credit, Upper Plains tribes have initiated a number of effective programs; for example, a number of units in tribal governments have been awarded the prestigious Honoring Nations Awards for their accomplishments (Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development 2007). But if their modern environment were not so taxing, perhaps they could achieve much more. In short, where institutions have created entangled interests, I expect that present-day conflict and related ongoing dysfunctions will grow.

Conflict in Other Venues

I argue that exhaustion from outside demands can sap expertise. Tribes that specialize in one variety of interaction can build knowledge that is specific to that kind of interaction. In contrast, tribes that are drawn into multiple and distinct venues may overextend their limited capacity. Thus, tribes’ performance in interactions with local governments’ legislative bodies should decline if tribes face political contestations in other domains that are particularly pressing.

To evaluate this premise of exhaustion elsewhere, I consider variation over time in the energy that tribes expend in a venue that is distinct from county legislative interactions. To be sure that I am measuring significant investments in venues that are clearly separated from legislative interactions, I want to identify activities that (a) demand significant time and energy, (b) generate skills that are not highly portable to county legislative interactions, (c) vary in part because of exogenous forces, so that tribes have difficulty predicting the exact timing of demands, and (d) do not allow tribes to adjust their involvement quickly and easily.

Here, I turn to the extent to which the tribe is involved in legal disputes—appeals cases in particular—as an indicator of this kind of exhaustion. It is reasonable to ask whether a variable that tracks courtroom conflict really just reflects other dynamics. An alternate hypothesis is that it actually measures overall tensions, not fluctuation in demands on tribes’ capacities. I am not suggesting that baseline racial conflict and momentary spikes in legal disputes are wholly unrelated. The data analysis that follows will examine whether conflict and exhaustion have unique dynamics.

Nor am I suggesting that lawsuits are a less desirable means of conflict resolution. Lawsuits are a way of forcing accommodations from intransigent adversaries, and they set precedents that can preclude or minimize potential future disputes. Lawsuits consume enormous resources, however, as many tribal leaders would attest: Lawyers are expensive, and lawsuits can take a great deal of time to reach resolution. Furthermore, the skills generated in winning legal battles can be quite venue-specific. Indeed, although McCool, Olson, and Robinson (Reference McCool, Olson and Robinson2007) provide excellent documentation of the accomplishments that Voting Rights Act litigation has achieved for American Indian voters, they also note that “(l)itigation, however, is complex, time-consuming, and heavily dependent on access to sophisticated counsel” (89). Also, I look to lawsuits—appeals in particular—because their timing is not necessarily under the control of the parties involved. Additionally, either party may feel compelled to continue in an appeals process, even if the context changes over time, because of the precedent at stake. As a result, it can be difficult—or simply impractical—for a tribe to back out of a suit at moments when it is stretched particularly thin.

On a related front, it is natural to wonder whether tribes’ strategies are wholly path-dependent processes. My findings indicate, however, that tribes are not locked into a particular path. Fortunately, the data at hand capture much over-time variation. For example, for one tribe, lawsuits are particularly frequent in 1990, 1992, and 1999, but not in 1991, 1998, or 2000. This timing is not entirely under the tribe's control, of course, given that the analysis focuses on cases in the appeals process.

Records of both the tribal council and the county commission show that, in 1990, 1992, and 1999—when lawsuits are particularly high—this tribe is less effective in its county interactions. In 1990, 1992, and 1999, county commission minutes show that a variety of the tribe's initiatives fail: proposals to coordinate on animal control, policing, ambulance services, 911 services, and a rodeo. The tribe cannot even persuade the county to write a letter of support for its application for a federal declaration of a natural disaster emergency. In 1991, 1998, and 2000, the patterns differ. The tribe's efforts at coordination on 911, telephone services, and traffic safety move forward. The county provides a letter supporting the tribe's opposition to a declaration of an endangered species.

The minutes contain important insights into the tribe's problems with ambulance services in years with a large number of suits. The tribe often asks for county assistance with the ambulance program, but the tribe's requests are sometimes vague and can change over short windows of time. County officials express frustration with this lack of clarity. A tribal liaison notes the organizational problems behind these errors: There is no full-time paid staff member who runs the program. The liaison remarks, “[i]t is difficult to get anything done without someone in charge and some type of continuity.” The flip side of the close attention to lawsuits is that there is no manpower left to run other vital efforts.

Other sources offer insights into the mechanisms at hand. For example, the proceedings of one tribal council reveal that program staff must assist with a brief in one lawsuit and compile “statistics on land holdings, land losses, and land acquisition” for attorneys. The staff is redirecting time away from other endeavors. If these statistics were portable to county interactions, we might expect them to show up in the many analyses and proposals about land issues that the tribe makes before the county council. This does not happen.

On another occasion, a tribal chair instructs fish and wildlife program staff on tactics that will help with a lawsuit. For the sake of the lawsuit, the tribal chair wants game wardens who look authoritative, and to that end, the chair wants new and better equipment purchased, but the chair does not want them to make any arrests of fishermen or hunters who trespass on tribal land. Again, the staff expends energy that may help with lawsuits, but diverts from other missions. One might mistakenly presume, reading the tribal council minutes, that the tribe hardly ever deals with the county commission. In fact, county–tribe interactions happen frequently but garner scarce consideration in the tribal council chambers.

Indeed, tribal leaders routinely acknowledge to both internal and external audiences how exhausting lawsuits are. Comments to this effect are easily documented within tribal council proceedings and in local newspapers. Also, in a series of conferences at South Dakota State University, a variety of tribal leaders discussed problems of exhaustion and the tradeoffs associated with legal disputes. The Attorney General of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe described the tribe's extensive legal battles with state government and remarked on the resources expended on lawsuits rather than on programs to address tribal needs (Emery Reference Emery1992). Similarly, the Chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe described extensive legal disputes with the state government and also the tribes’ inadequate investments in key programs such as economic development (Bourland Reference Bourland1992). An official at Sisseton–Wahpeton Community College noted that tribes work extensively to confront fundamental disputes over jurisdiction raised by nearby governments; he remarked on the fear and resignation that result (Lawrence Reference Lawrence1992). In his view, what his tribe instead needs most is staff who feel motivated to build appropriate specialized skills and to navigate politics. The Chairman of the Yankton Sioux Tribe noted that negotiations with local governments only succeed with significant investments of time and energy to educate local officials about tribal government and counter stereotypes (Cournoyer Reference Cournoyer1990). A state senator who is a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Chairman of the Flandreau Santee Sioux tribe described the same dilemma: Resources for legislative relations are constrained, but significant outreach is necessary if relations with nearby governments are to improve (Taylor Reference Taylor1992; Velandra Reference Velandra1992). These speakers describe the importance of these same labor-intensive legislative strategies—education and relationship building—across a variety nearby governments.

It seems reasonable to conclude that legislative negotiating skills are fairly portable from one legislature to the next. At times when courtroom interactions increase, however, legislative strategizing degrades. No doubt, tribes may be making a worthwhile tradeoff. Perhaps there is more at stake in a given lawsuit than in a given legislative interaction. The point, though, is that sharp tradeoffs occur. Resources are limited, so tribes cannot do everything well.

Institutionalized Government and Developed Economy

I examine the effect of tribal institutions and development on expertise and on success in interactions with county governments. My expectation is that better-endowed tribes, as indicated by high levels of government institutionalization or economic development, will succeed more often.

Checkerboarding

As noted before, checkerboarding is rare in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest but commonplace in the Upper Plains. I use the extent of checkerboarding as a measure of Indian–White conflict. To assess the extent of checkerboarding for the four counties where it exists, I measured the percentage of the county population that consists of non-Indians living within the reservation boundaries.Footnote ¹⁴ Among the checkerboarded counties in the sample, there was substantial variation in the magnitude: The average was 19% and the upper bound was around 40%. For two of the counties, the degree of checkerboarding changed over the sample decade.

Measuring Court Conflict

I also measure the participation of tribes in lawsuits with county and state government. Specifically, I measure the number of legal disputes with states and localities that are in the appeals process, and whether the tribe (a) is arguing an appeal in the given year, (b) has an appeal that is upcoming, and/or (c) is currently between appeals on a case.Footnote ¹⁵ There was substantial variation in the magnitude of exhaustion: The average number of suits was 1.4, the upper bound was nearly 10, and the standard deviation was around 2. My expectation is that participation in legal appeals exhausts a tribe's resources, making a tribe less effective in legislative interactions with county boards. To control for noise in this measure, I generate a dichotomous threshold for whether number of suits at a given moment is especially high.Footnote ¹⁶

Every tribe in the sample had at least one year when the number of suits was below average. Six tribes had at least one year that was above average. Were the tribes with exclusively low numbers of suits or with occasionally very high numbers of suits unusual in other ways? They were not. These tribes were spread across variables of interest such as government institutionalization, economic development, rates of checkerboarding, tribal population, and region.

Are legal disputes simply a duplicate measure of baseline conflict? The question is natural, but correlation coefficients suggest that legal disputes are not just a barometer of county–tribe tensions. First, the measures of legal disputes and baseline conflict of checkerboarding are scarcely correlated, at .04. Also, if legal disputes simply reflect overall conflict, perhaps they are correlated with the most acrimonious of county interactions—interactions over negative externalities. In fact, there is nearly no relationship: The variables correlate at .04. Finally, if legal disputes are an indicator of overall conflict, surely they should correlate strongly with the number of legislative interactions with county government. After all, if they measure a moment of intense, conflict-ridden engagement, then county legislative interactions and lawsuits should rise together. But they do not. The correlation is .005. These patterns suggest that although legal disputes affect tribes, lawsuits and legislative interactions unfold in distinct venues.

Control Variables

I include the following control variables.

Log of Tribal Population. I control for the tribal population in each of the twelve counties in the sample: I take the log of the population of American Indians living on the reservation in Census 2000.Footnote ¹⁷

Easy Issues, Hard Issues, and Negative Externalities. as described in Section III.

Stages in Participation. I control for the average number of stages in decision-making in tribe–county interactions for each county. In some places, a greater proportion of intermediate decisions were made in closed proceedings or by the county bureaucracy, and county commission hearings were more apt to be reserved for final, up-or-down decisions. In other places, more decision making is vested in the county commission than in the county bureaucracy.

Regression Results: Success in Interactions

Table 3 presents analyses of tribal success or failure in the 529 interactions with county boards in my dataset. The three models show that all types of tribes with some sort of endowment were more successful than tribes with both less economic development and less government institutionalization; the effects are statistically significant. Consistently, tribes with both government institutionalization and economic development fared the best; in second place were the tribes with government institutionalization but not economic development. The differences between these and the three tribes that had both government institutionalization and economic development are statistically significant.Footnote ¹⁸ One implication of these differences is that dollars helped to build governments with more effective performance, but wealth did not compensate for impoverished institutionalization.

TABLE 3.

Logistic Regression Predicting Tribal Success in Interactions

Notes: Robust standard errors are below the coefficients in parentheses and are adjusted for clustering by tribe. Significance at the 1%, 5%, and 10% levels is indicated by ***, **, and *, respectively.

^a Indian–White conflict = If checkerboarded reservation, percent of county population that is non-Indians living within reservation bounds per year. Varies considerably over time for a small set of tribes.

^b Exhaustion elsewhere = At least three ongoing legal disputes with states and/or localities in appeals process per year. Does not vary over time for some tribes.

The qualitative analysis and the descriptive statistics suggested that Upper Plains counties are more hostile to tribal aims; here, I want to consider whether we can explain Upper Plains uniqueness by including the measure of underlying Indian–White conflict. Indeed, the two effects substitute for one another with statistically significant effects. The quantitative findings demonstrate that conflict is not an immutable characteristic of the Upper Plains. Rather, differing ingredients make racial conflict more pronounced in some specific locales but not in others.

Finally, in years when tribes were involved in more court appeals, tribes’ success also dipped. The effects were statistically significant. In other words, when tribes’ capacities were especially taxed, they were less successful in interactions with county councils. It was not enough to have greater expert capacity or a less hostile environment. Tribes also needed a reprieve from deploying their expert capacity in other venues.

These findings hold up under a variety of alternate specifications. Appendix B examines whether key effects endure with the inclusion of additional features of the county, past dynamics on an issue, patterns of support and opposition, who set the agenda, and policy areas. The key effects persist. There is change in the rank ordering of the impacts from various combinations of institutionalization and development, but all effects remain positive and significant.Footnote ¹⁹ Some new variables are also significant. Agenda-setting power matters: It helps if tribes can choose the timing and topic of interactions. Other statistically significant features are whether the nearest locality is incorporated or urbanized, whether there is support or opposition from other players in county politics, and whether the tribe has an established track record of favorable county interactions. Finally, key results persist when exhaustion is measured as a dichotomous variable. Appendix C includes further checks. I reran the analysis to exclude easy interactions and interactions that the tribe did not start. To be sure that outcomes were not driven by the particular circumstances of tribes with treaty-based fishing rights, I inserted controls for these kinds of tribes. I also controlled for the total number of interactions and for tribal population. Appendix D considers alternate specifications of conflict and exhaustion. I split the sample by the presence of checkerboarding. As a final robustness check, I considered several alternate specifications of investment in lawsuits.Footnote ²⁰

Predicted Probabilities

Figure 1 graphs predicted probabilities from the model in Table 3, to translate the regression results into marginal effects. In the calculation, I included most variables at their means or at the most common value for noncontinuous variables. The predicted outcomes presented here are for “hard” issues.

FIGURE 1.

Predicted Probabilities for Success Rate in Interactions

Notes: Low Indian–White conflict: No checkerboarding. High Indian–White conflict: 40% of county was non-Indians within reservation. Low exhaustion elsewhere: Less than three legal disputes with states and/or localities in appeals process per year. High exhaustion elsewhere: three or more ongoing legal disputes with states and/or localities in appeals process per year.

As we have seen in Table 3, both institutionalization and development improve success rates. Also, success rates fall if court activity is intense. In this model, high conflict can cause success rates to tumble as much as 40 percentage points. Heavy involvement in appeals can knock as many as 12 percentage points off of success rates. Even when conflict and exhaustion are low, tribes with neither high institutionalization nor high development have success rates that are at least 23 percentage points behind better-endowed tribes.