An Introduction to the Tribal Governance Database Project

Abstract

"This paper is designed to serve as an introduction to the Tribal Governance Panel Dataset Project, a project that is in the process of compiling a comprehensive set of more than 300 political, economic, sociological, public health, and other indicators for each of the 341 federally-recognized Native American tribes in the contiguous United States. Comparative small-n and large-n quantitative work on Native American tribal governments is virtually non-existent due to the lack of a comprehensive source of data, an issue that this project aims to remedy. The paper will review existing work on tribal governance, highlighting the limitations of existing small-n comparative analyses, and suggesting how quantitative analysis might be used to test various established hypotheses regarding the relationship between governance form and various socio-economic outcomes. It will then provide a background behind the dataset and the variables collected thus far. It will also present several preliminary analyses employing a variety of comparison of means techniques in order to illustrate ways in which the data may be analyzed once the database is finalized. Outcome variables that are examined include per capita income, nominal per capita income growth from 1990 to 2010, economic growth rate from 1990 to 2010, unemployment rate, and unemployment rate change from 1990 to 2010. Finally, the presentation will be used to solicit ideas for collaborative research with interested Workshop-affiliated faculty and students."