Members of a House of Chiefs are selected neither by a universal suffrage process of those they represent nor by the state executive or legislature they advise: Their function is to express a cultural, historical and/or ethnic point of view on public policies.
The process by which individuals qualify for membership varies, but is based on tradition specific to his or her (e.g. the Rain Queen) historic community or ethnic group.
Sometimes the qualifying position is obtained through heredity within a local dynasty, sometimes through selection by consensus of a ritually or socially prominent subset of a community, and sometimes by a combination thereof.
Historically, chiefs were the last indigenous rulers before colonisation of a people, and their modern versions often continue to play a local cultural role of varying significance.
[clarification needed] Another way to include traditional chiefs in a nation's political life is to assign them a number of seats in a wider assembly.