Partisan Interests or Public Good? State-Level Data Privacy Policymaking in an Era of Federal Retrenchment

• In Event: Federalism and Policymaking

Abstract

The United States remains one of the few advanced democracies without comprehensive federal data privacy legislation, leaving states as the de facto regulators of an increasingly consequential policy domain. This has led to a mirage of sector-specific and state laws that create a fragmented landscape with unaddressed gaps. This fragmented landscape offers a valuable opportunity to examine a broader and more fundamental question in American politics: under what conditions do states act in the public interest, and when do partisan and ideological considerations override constituent needs?

Unlike most contemporary democracies, where privacy protection has been pursued through centralized, rights-based frameworks, the United States' constitutional design, its deep tradition of state sovereignty, a political culture skeptical of federal overreach, and legislative institutions structured around incremental consensus have collectively made federal action difficult and state-level action expected.

This paper draws on two complementary works in progress. The first analyzes federal data privacy bills to map the structural and political bottlenecks that have prevented legislative consensus at the national level, including intergovernmental conflict. The second examines state-level variation in enacted privacy laws, exploring whether differences in legislative scope, rights conferred, and enforcement strength are explained by measurable focusing events, such as data breaches, or by the ideological orientation of state governments. Preliminary evidence points strongly toward the latter.

We argue that data privacy is a particularly tractable domain for studying these dynamics. Its recency, the comparative availability of legislative text across states, and the salience of the federal-state tension make it well-suited for systematic policy analysis. Crucially, the findings are not intended to remain domain-specific. Understanding what drives states toward or away from proactive policymaking in the data privacy context offers a framework that can be extrapolated to other areas, from environmental regulation to healthcare, where federal retrenchment is pushing greater responsibility onto states with uneven results. If partisan ideology consistently outweighs constituent need as a predictor of policy generosity, then residents of certain states face systematic disadvantage not because their circumstances differ, but because their governments do. This has profound implications for equity and democratic accountability, and it reframes state policy variation not as healthy federalist experimentation, but as a potential mechanism of structured inequality.

Further analysis will examine the political, institutional, and socioeconomic factors that predict privacy policy adoption and stringency across states, drawing on legislative data, political ideology scores, and demographic indicators. We aim to contribute a theoretically grounded and empirically supported account of the conditions under which state governments act as genuine agents of public welfare versus vehicles of partisan preference. By examining these conditions, this paper informs how state-level policy gaps are addressed in an era of deliberate federal withdrawal

Author

• Aanuoluwapo Uduebor, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
  Presenting Author