Indians 78, Washington State 0: Stories about Indians and the Law

In the 1970s Washington State lost a series of legal cases related to Native Americans. These cases exemplify the need for knowledge of federal Indian law-but such knowledge, out of context, is insufficient. Key aspects of federal Indian law are hard to accept because of conflicting stories that Americans already believe. The authors discuss the importance of stories and review commonly believed stories that block acceptance of federal Indian law. They then discuss basic principles of Indian law and distill four questions to help determine tribal jurisdiction. The authors review the Marshal trilogy—three Supreme Court cases that set the foundations of modern Native American law—and show how the legal principles play out in an analysis of three contemporary court cases.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics

Important research programs within New Institutional Economics advance culturalist arguments to explain failures of economic development. Focusing on the work of Douglass C. North and Avner Greif, this article argues that such arguments rely on an essentialist conception of culture that is both historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. Greif’s work in particular rests on a selective use of empirical data that ultimately distorts the deductive models that are at the core of his work. As a result, both scholars use culture to account for outcomes that are more adequately explained as the product of social conflict and political struggles—struggles in which culture plays a far more contingent and destabilizing role than the one they attribute to it. What is needed, I argue, is to link arguments about the persistence of inefficient institutions with a sociologically informed conception of culture as an ensemble of resources that enhance rather than constrain the scope of individual agency. To come to terms with the effects of culture on institutional formation and change it is necessary to replace the essentialism articulated by North and Greif with a strategic-instrumentalist view in which culture is compatible with a wide spectrum of economic behaviors, individual actions, and thus institutional trajectories.

Challenging U.S. Policymakers' Image of an Isolationist Public

A persisting question in international studies is whether academic research can have an impact on the making of foreign policy. Much research has shown that policy decisions can be greatly influenced by misperceptions, just as much as by objective factors. The article describes an effort by academic researchers to challenge U.S. policymakers' image of an actor in the U.S. foreign policy process—the American public. The study's focus was a widely held assumption in the U.S. foreign policy community that the American public in the wake of the Cold War was entering a renewed phase of isolationism, similar to the interwar years. The study first interviewed policy practitioners on their perceptions of the public, then performed a comprehensive review of existing polling data, and finally conducted new polls with input from policymakers themselves. The net result of the elite interviews and the analysis of public attitudes revealed a significant gap in all areas, which is presented in synopsis. Interviews with policy practitioners reveal two key dynamics that could well contribute to policymakers' misreading the public: a failure to seek out information about the public and a tendency to assume that the vocal public is representative of the general public. Indications that the study did have some impact on the thinking of policy practitioners are discussed in the conclusion.