Candidate Name:  Aanuoluwapo Uduebor
Program:  Public Policy
Committee Chairs: Dr. Gordon Hull & Dr. Jason Windett
Committee Members: Dr. Jourdan Davis and Dr. Elizabeth Stearns
Abstract: Despite persistently high public concern, the United States lacks a comprehensive federal data privacy law. This dissertation examines the resulting gap between citizen demand and legislative supply, and proposes a framework to close it. Using an original congressional dataset spanning the 81st through 119th Congress and Pew Research Center American Trends Panel Wave 127 survey data (N = 5,101), three studies show that legislative attention to privacy is episodic, rising after high-salience breaches but advancing substantively only under favorable partisan conditions; that citizen concern is driven by affective worry and resignation rather than accurate legal knowledge, and tracks poorly with congressional attention, which instead follows majority-party sponsorship patterns; and that a GDPR-style comprehensive statute is ill suited to U.S. federalism, sectoral tradition, and market-driven data governance. In response, the dissertation proposes a layered, polycentric framework distributing responsibility across state government, industry accountability, and citizen literacy, reframing the current fragmented landscape of U.S. privacy governance as the predictable outcome of misaligned public demand and legislative supply rather than the failure of either alone.