Bricks in the Wall The Politics of Housing in Europe West European Politics Series

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.

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

Alison Johnston is associate professor and the U.G. Dubach Chair in Political Science in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University, USA.

Paulette Kurzer is professor in the School of Government and Public Policy and Director of the M.A. in International Security Studies at the University of Arizona, USA.