The Role of State Preemption on the Health Equity & Economic Security of Communities of Color in the Kansas City Metro Area

Troost Avenue Sign

This project was recently funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The study focuses on a critical area of democratic governance studies: when can, and should, a state preempt local jurisdictions? The team from CDG, led by Chris Koliba, and the National Academy of Public Administration’s Center for Intergovernmental Partnerships, will be conducting a study in the Kansas City Metro region asking three questions:

  1. What factors drive preemption in policymaking, and how do they influence the decision to preempt local decision making, and in what ways?
  2. What are the consequences of preemptive policies on the health and well-being of local communities of color?
  3. What opportunities for innovation, experimentation, and adaptation in policymaking emerge when racial justice and health equity advocates consider the policy narrative ecosystem shaping preemptive dynamics?

The preemptive policies of interest:

  • Preemption of minimum wages
  • Preemption of rent control; prohibition of evictions

This study will employ policy narrative analysis to answer research question's 1 and 2. Policy narratives are vehicles for conveying policy goals, such as how, and to whom, health and economic policies are distributed (equity), how costs and benefits of policies and problems are accounted for and described (efficiency), how policies provide for needs of certain beneficiaries (welfare), how the need to overcome or mitigate risks informs policy actions (security), and how balancing the preservation of personal freedoms while doing no harm to others is pursued through policy actions (liberty). These policy goals underlie words and phrases used to justify, support, or object to certain policies. Policy narratives are plot-centered stories focusing on socially, politically, and economically significant problems and solutions. Policy narratives contain characters (often framed as victims, villains, and heroes) that serve to identify the intentional and unintentional biases that favor some groups of people over others. With settings anchored in time and place, policy narratives will likely follow story arcs in the form of plots and can include metaphors, numbers, and causal inferences. The more powerful narratives will diffuse a moral message.

Methods of analysis will likely include traditional human coding, Large Language Models (LLMs), and n-gram analysis.

This project is funded by the Policies for Action: "Six New Projects Will Investigate the Impacts of Preemption on Racial Justice and Health Equity."