It is puzzling that states with similar state building experiences see differences in the salience of kinship authority. While factors occurring during state building – colonialism, the extent of infrastructure, and ruling family politics – can shape aspects of kinship salience, pre-existing conditions play a crucial role as well. Existing accounts tend to overlook these preconditions in their analysis of state building, particularly in cases that involve a strong outside influence. However, politics in kinship-based societies did not begin with Western intervention. The nature of kinship politics before this intervention set important constraining factors on the state-building process. These constraints in turn played a key role in shaping politics, including the salience of kinship authority, after state building.

Whether kinship authority has governing or instrumentalised political salience after state building is a function of access to vital limited resources. This access can be either competitive or cooperative. When access is competitive, different kinship groups compete for these resources. While groups can form ad-hoc arrangements, the inherently competitive nature of access precludes stable long-term cooperation. During state building, therefore, rulers reach out to individual kinship groups to disrupt kinship authority and bring them within the purview of the bureaucratic state. This kind of outreach, however, incentivises kinship groups and their members to reassert kinship authority since doing so preserves access to patronage. While the government expands its bureaucratic apparatus and extends it into non-urban areas, kinship authority instrumentalises bureaucratic authority to provide patronage and political access. Furthermore, the government's nationalist narrative in these cases will also reify kinship authority by centring it in narratives of the state's heritage. Thus, after state building in such cases, kinship authority will have governing salience, meaning that it relegates bureaucracy to a tool for obtaining resources and political power.

In contrast, when access is cooperative, kinship groups form protobureaucracies to manage access to resources. These proto-bureaucracies are run by members of kinship groups who have the assent of local kinship group members, but their authority comes from their knowledge of the bureaucratic system of resource management. Proto-bureaucracies therefore act as an intermediary between kinship authority and bureaucratic authority. They are structured similarly to government bureaucracies, but their staff have assent to govern from the local population based on their authority as members of kinship groups.