From Intense Preferences to Political Participation: The Politics of Housing

• In Event: Political Preferences and Divides

Abstract

How do the legislative and legal structure and institutions shape the power dynamic on the issue of housing? When do people prioritize one policy dimension for local participation? What motivate political participation in pressing for change and the forces countering it, especially when participation is costly? Building on a topic model of captions of recorded local government meetings in the United States and archival materials about German urban development from 1950s to 1980s, I argue that the existing legal and legislative framework has an intrinsic bias favoring property and as a result creating uneven participation costs more vulnerable groups such as tenants to participate in local politics. This premise then motivates a two-step preference to participation framework that formally incorporates the concept of “time” and political knowledge of participation in the theory. I use two empirical strategies to test my theory with the selection of three country contexts: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany to reflect diverse political and institutional context with respect to the housing system, local political institutions, and the distribution of homeownership. First, I consider each interlocutor of active participants of local politics in urban and suburban contexts as a single case of study. By conducting semi-structured interviews with an oral history component of the interlocutor’s path to activism and/or political participation with active participants of local politics in the urban and suburban contexts of these three countries, I map each interlocutor’s self-reported motives, political knowledge, activist history as well as housing experiences for cross-case comparisons and analyses to test my theory of local participation. Second, I use a conjoint survey experiment with behavioral measures to test the empirical relevant of information asymmetry on how to participate and the intensity margin of preferences. I expect that individuals who have both developed strong preferences on the proposed housing development and received treatment information about local government meetings are more likely to engage in local politics.

Author

• Sophia Wang, Yale University