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Abstract
The forms of political participation utilized by Indian nations have changed dramatically since the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. The emergence and expansion of Indian gaming since then have provided tribes with an increased motivation to interact on a government-to-government basis with state governments; it has also provided them with the financial resources to do so in myriad new ways. During this period, tribes have increased their presence in state capitals through direct lobbying. In this paper, we study tribes’ decision to lobby state governments. In particular, we are interested in the role of tribal resources and gaming operations in determining which tribes decide to register to lobby state governments. Using Gray and Lowery's data set that list all lobbying registrations in the 50 states from 1997 to 1999 and the year 2007, we find significant variation in lobbying registrations among Indian nations. We model the lobbying registration decision at the tribal and state levels, using data on gaming compacts and amendments, tribal resources and state characteristics.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank David Lowery and Virgina Gray for providing data on tribal lobby registrations and Jenn Haas, Abigail Rury, and Rochelle Rogers for help gathering additional data used in this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. See Wilkins and Stark (2011) for a discussion of American Indians as unique, pre-constitutional sovereigns distinct from traditional minority groups.
2. This is not to say that there are no Native elected officials. According to the National Conference of State Legislators there were 76 members from 17 states in 2014. See http://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribal-institute/national-caucus-native-american-state-legislators.aspx (accessed September 2014).
3. Pre-existing status means Indian nations existed as independent sovereign governments before the creation of the USA and made treaties with the USA on a government-to-government basis.
4. This includes 337 Indian nations in the 48 contiguous states and 229 Alaska Native villages or corporations. This list is published annually by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and is updated as additional tribes are recognized by the federal government. An introduction to tribal governments can be found at http://www.ncai.org/about-tribes.
5. Cornell (Citation1988) notes that some Indian nations were active in lobbying the government and had sufficient resources to lobby as a result of other forms of economic development like utilization of tribal natural resources including timber, coal, and gas. Wilkins (2000) also notes the interest group activity of some Indian nations; however limited resources often lead to the creation of pan-tribal groups like the Council of Energy Resource Tribes.
6. In Seminole, the Court determined that states could not prohibit Indian Gaming because it lacked regulatory Authority.
7. See especially Getches, Wilkinson, and Williams (Citation1998) for an overview of the provisions of and legal challenges to the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.
8. See http://www.nigc.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=E3BeULzk1cA%3d&tabid=1006 (accessed September 29, 2014). See Boehmke and Witmer (Citation2004) for a detailed analysis of state-level factors that influence compacting activity.
9. Proposition 1A changed the California State Constitution to allow Indian gaming in the state. An earlier initiative, Proposition 5 passed in 1998, did not alter the state constitution; thus Indian gaming remained unconstitutional prior to 2000.
10. See http://www.nigc.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=E3BeULzk1cA%3d&tabid=1006 (accessed September 29, 2014).
11. Gaming has also allowed a number of Indian nations to secure a significant source of funds for improving social service programs, education, infrastructure, law enforcement, and other programs (McCulloch Citation1994; Cornell et al. Citation1998). See also the National Indian Gaming Association webpage at http://www.Indiangaming.org for additional information on the programs funded by Indian gaming receipts.
13. Note that while registration and lobbying are not necessarily identical, registration serves as a strong proxy for lobbying. While groups may register to lobby in a given year and end up not lobbying after all they must register if they do intend to lobby. Furthermore, even for groups that register and do not lobby, registrations still measure the intent to lobby or a desire to stay informed by hiring a lobbyist. Crucially, they also provide a comparable measure across states – Gray and Lowery (Citation1998) find no evidence that registration requirements affect the comparability of registration data across states – which is critical for our analysis.
14. Originally, David Lowery sent us all groups registered in 1997–1999 matching any of the following search terms: “tribe”, “tribal”, “Indian”, “pueblo”, “nation”, and “rancheria”. Subsequently, we received their 2007 data for Civil Rights, Sports, and Government categories, which we then also searched for matches to the aforementioned terms. This likely misses a few cases, but appeared to catch most of the relevant registrations. Their data prior to 1997 do not identify individual registrants and therefore cannot be used to identify tribal lobby registrations.
15. Alliance of California Tribes: Indian Tribes Announce New Statewide Organization. Accessed November 18, 2014. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alliance-of-california-tribes-indian-tribes-announce-new-statewide-organization-76324807.html
16. The negative binomial would also be appropriate and allows for overdispersion (the variance of the count could be greater than its mean), but it produced no substantive or statistical differences in our results and we found little to no evidence of overdispersion.
17. In a Poisson model exp(b) gives the proportion increase in the outcome variable for a one unit change in the corresponding independent variable. Here exp(.024) = 1.0233.
18. We note that a model estimated using only states with one or more Federally recognized tribe produced similar results.
19. Since we use the log of the number of tribes to control for exposure, we added one to the number of tribes so that states without tribes are not dropped (since tribes from other states can register there). If we run our analysis using only states with at least one tribe, the results are substantively unchanged.
20. Astute readers will notice that the number of observations does not match the number of Federally recognized tribes. This reflects the fact that some tribes have gaming in multiple states and some tribes register in more than one state, which creates multiple observations per tribe in our data set.
21. Since tribal characteristics are gathered from the 2000 Census, they do not vary over time. See http://factfinder.census.gov/home/aian/sf_aian.html for more information.
22. To calculate these effects we used our model to predict the probability that each tribe would register under three scenarios for the gaming variable: first, their observed gaming status; second, gaming set to zero for all tribes; third, gaming set to one for all tribes. We then added up these probabilities to obtain an estimate of total tribal lobby registrations in each year. The observed total differs a little from since some tribes register in more than one state and our analysis here is of whether a tribe registers at all, rather than the number of states in which it registers.