Partisan Preemption: Intergovernmental Conflict in the Era of Urban-Rural Polarization

Abstract

Over the last decade, intergovernmental conflict in the United States has escalated in response to aggressive state curtailment of local policymaking power and autonomy. These municipal preemption laws are distinct from past preemption disputes for both their sweeping nature and partisan motivation, most cases being of Republican state legislatures preempting Democratic elected officials and liberal urban electorates. This thesis builds on past empirical studies of the so-called “new preemption” by testing whether the relative concentration of a policy’s presumptive supporters in large cities is associated with greater preemption likelihood. I look at the social geography of four social groups defined by race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and household income and restrict my sample to preemption legislation passed between 2011 and 2019 barring localities from adopting any of six different labor policies. Using a multivariate model controlling for state-level demographics and the partisan balance of power in state legislatures, I find that states where Black residents and low income households were more concentrated in large cities, and where the college educated were less concentrated, were also significantly more likely to preempt local labor laws in this period. The spatial distribution of Hispanic residents within a state was not a significant correlate of preemption use. These results are meaningfully large, such that the full range of observed variation across states in the relative concentration of Black, college educated, and low income residents is associated with a difference of between two and four preempted policies. I conclude by discussing some of the analysis’s methodological shortcomings and ways that future empirical research can help refine our understanding of how social geography shapes intergovernmental conflict and American political economy more broadly.