Full Description
This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of how politics shape housing markets and vice-versa. It demonstrates how housing impacts a variety of social and political phenomenon including populist politics, generational divides, wealth inequality, monetary policy, and the welfare state.
Housing and housing markets have important implications for economic stability, public policy, domestic politics and wealth inequality in Europe and beyond. Yet despite its importance, housing has received relatively little attention in comparative politics scholarship. The contributions within this volume push the scholarship of housing into fresh, innovative directions. The chapters focus on housing's contribution to wealth inequality, how housing constrains governments' policy choices in welfare state reform and how it can strengthen governments' hands in financial regulation. Other contributions reveal the impact of housing on central bankers' motivations for implementing monetary expansion, highlight the generational divide in gaining access to home-ownership, demonstrate how housing-driven wealth inequality steers voters political preferences towards right-wing populism, and explain how housing gradually shifted from being a social right to an object of investment in Europe, even within its most egalitarian states. These contributions cover a diversity of cases in Western and Eastern Europe and theoretical paradigms that will appeal to scholars and policy makers alike.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.
Contents
Bricks in the wall: the politics of housing in Europe
Alison Johnston and Paulette Kurzer
1. Housing prices and wealth inequality in Western Europe
Gregory W. Fuller, Alison Johnston and Aidan Regan
2. The young and the restless: housing access in the critical years
Lindsay B. Flynn
3. Housing and populism
David Adler and Ben Ansell
4. The politics of mortgage credit expansion in the small coordinated market economies
Karen M. Anderson and Paulette Kurzer
5. Equality as a driver of inequality? Universalistic welfare, generalised creditworthiness and financialised housing markets
Bent Sofus Tranøy, Mary Ann Stamsø and Ingrid Hjertaker
6. From asset to patrimony: the re-emergence of the housing question
Dorothee Bohle and Leonard Seabrooke
7. The inversion of the 'really big trade-off': homeownership and pensions in long-run perspective
Tod Van Gunten and Sebastian Kohl
8. The politics of quantitative easing and housing stimulus by the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, 2008‒2018
Alexander Reisenbichler
9. Covering the private parts: the (re-)nationalisation of housing finance
Herman Mark Schwartz
