Abstract
The enormous growth in house prices in Europe since the 1990s has led to increasing concerns about the affordability of housing for ordinary citizens. This article explores the relationship between housing affordability – house prices relative to incomes – and the demand for redistributive and housing policy, using data drawn from European and British social surveys and an analysis of British elections. It shows that, as unaffordability rises, citizens appear in aggregate to become less supportive of redistribution, interventionist housing policy and left-wing parties. However, this aggregate rise, driven by the predominance of homeowners in most European countries, masks a growing polarization in preferences between renters and owners in less affordable regions.
Highlights
There has been a recent surge in scholarly interest in the political effects of inequality in the advanced industrial world
We have explored how declining housing affordability across Europe affects preferences for social policy and political outcomes
We have found consistent evidence that declining affordability - driven by increases in housing prices - decreases support for redistribution, especially among homeowners, across Europe and increases votes for the Conservative party in the UK
Summary
There has been a recent surge in scholarly interest in the political effects of inequality in the advanced industrial world. Rising unaffordability leads to an aggregate shift to less redistributive policy attitudes, more right-wing voting, and greater antipathy to government intervention in housing markets, largely because in almost all European regions, homeowners form a majority and want to protect the value of their housing. This overall ‘right-ward’ shift masks underlying polarization. These three separate analyses permit us to move from how housing affordability affects individual preferences to its impact on individual behavior, as well as considering the degree to which housing affordability polarizes attitudes towards housing policy itself and towards the broader role of government in narrowing market differences
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