Sociohistorical factors in institutional efficacy: economic development in three American Indian cases

Institutions of governance are key factors in successful economic development; that effective institutions, in turn, depend on legitimacy with constituent communities, itself a matter of the goodness of fit between formal institutions and informal institutions - essentially cultural repertoires; and that such legitimacy will be easier or more difficult to construct depending on the historically developed nature of those communities, the derivation of these formal institutions, and the degree of power they are free to exercise. The remainder of this article examines the cases of three Apache nations in the US Southwest to illustrate and test the plausibility of this argument. -from Authors