All That Glitters . . . The Rise of American Indian Tribes in State Political Behavior

American Indian Policy in the States

“…As one of the poorest groups in the United States, Native Americans and groups that have advocated for their interests were often limited by a lack of resources, including financial and informational, needed to compete in the policy arena (Cornell, ; Gross, 1972; Witmer and Boehmke, ). There is growing evidence that many, although certainly not all, Indian nations and pan‐tribal groups have begun to use resources available with Indian gaming to seek to influence the political process at multiple levels of government (Evans, ; Witmer and Boehmke, ; Holyoke, ; Hansen and Skopek, ; Skopek, Engstrom, and Hansen, ; Goldberg and Champagne, ; Corntassel and Witmer, ; Mason, ). Thus a primary impediment to Native efforts to engage in the agenda‐setting process appears to have been reduced for some tribes, adding additional importance to identifying whether American Indian issues are present in state policy agendas.…”

“…Despite the change to a new era of tribal‐state relations, few scholars have fully considered the policy interactions between tribes and states, although there has been increasing attention to American Indian policy in the years since IGRA. For example, Boehmke and Witmer () have examined the diffusion of Indian gaming policy between the states following the passage of IGRA, while others (Hansen and Skopek, ; Witmer and Boehmke, ; Skopek, Engstrom, and Hansen, ; Goldberg and Champagne, ; Corntassel and Witmer, ) have focused on the efforts of tribes to mobilize newly available resources to influence elections, and ultimately policy, at the state level. Evans (, ) expands the analysis to include tribal interaction and policy making at both the state and local level.…”

“…Here they focus on Indian contributions to office‐seekers at the state level, including governor, attorney general, and the state legislature (Hansen and Skopek, ; Boehmke and Witmer, ). Others have examined the lobbying efforts of Indian nations (Skopek, Engstrom, and Hansen, ; Holyoke, ). In addition, interviews and surveys of tribal leaders may also contribute to our understanding of their interest in state‐level politics.…”

The Political Economy of American Indian Gaming

“…In particular, the requirement for tribal-state compacts forced a shift in the tribal political effort from federal to state arenas and from a legalistic strategy to something more like an interest-group strategy (Skopek et al 2005). Seminole reinforced this trend.…”

Indian Nations as Interest Groups

“…While an emerging literature has utilized the organized interests perspective to study political activity by Indian nations, particularly for political expenditures (e.g., Skopek, Engstrom, and Hansen 2005;Witmer and Boehmke 2007), we believe that it is still underused as previous studies have rarely explicitly evaluated its effectiveness for understanding tribal activities. In this article we explore the value of this perspective in more detail by conducting regression analysis to study Indian nations' campaign con tributions to all U.S. senators since the passage of IGRA in 1988IGRA in until 2004 In particular, we rely on a well-established literature on the factors that help determine contributions by organized interests to provide a theoretically motivated set of explanatory variables, including senators' institutional standing, ideology, electoral prospects, and constituency.…”