Constitutional change among American Indian tribes: an economic perspective

Abstract This paper explores the constitutional history of American Indian tribes since the 1930s. We compile a novel data set on 1,016 constitutional change episodes by 290 tribes. We leverage this information to explore the determinants of variation in tribal constitutional change over time and across tribes. First, we show that the location of tribes influences their propensity to amend, with tribes from the Great Plains and Eastern regions doing so at much higher rates than the rest. We then investigate the influence of changes in federal attitudes towards tribal sovereignty. Our analysis unveils a relationship between a tribe’s demographic and political characteristics on the one hand and its propensity to amend and constitutional longevity on the other. We show that membership size (in 1926) and whether a tribe adopts directly democratic forms of governance positively affects how much and how often it amends its constitution. We also find a surprising positive association between constitutional rigidity and the number and rate at which tribes amend. Our results confirm the influence of federal Indian policy on the trajectory of American Indian sovereignty. Changes in federal Indian policy significantly affect tribes’ choice to amend their constitutions, with the number of amendments per tribe per year doubling during the so-called ‘Self-Determination’ period (1968–1988).