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Housing and left/right cleavage
While popular culture tends to link home ownership with right-wing voting, studies conducted across Europe tend to show mixed results. In Sweden, homeowners from left-wing social classes are likelier to report themselves as right-wing. In France, middle-class voters were three times more likely to vote for Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2012 French presidential election, but results showed few variations between homeowners and tenants among lower-class and upper-class voters. In Germany, homeowners were more likely to vote for conservative parties when house prices were rising. In the UK, studies on the Housing Act 1980 and the 1983 United Kingdom general election tend to show that while purchasing council houses was linked to a decreased likelihood of voting for the Labour Party (UK), it is mostly the Alliance (center-left) that gained those defecting voters. Studies in the UK and Germany have also highlighted links between home ownership and the redirection of voting patterns towards center-left parties. In line with results from the 1983 general election, a more recent study has argued that as part of a broader process of ‘gentrification’ of Labour electoral interests, UK homeowners tend to divert from the Conservative party (UK) towards a party that reconciles economic interests and left-wing ideals. In Germany, one study has also pointed out a similar ‘embourgeoisement’ effect of the SPD vote.

Regarding preferences for policy proposals, some studies from the UK tend to demonstrate that, as houses are fixed assets, right-wing homeowners who have seen an increase in their property value tend to be less favorable to redistributive policies and social insurance programs. As their property value increases, Conservative voters tend to consider, to a larger degree, houses, a form of self-supplied insurance, which disincentivizes support for such programs. Those policy preferences are likely to be present to a greater extent when it comes to long-term social insurance and redistributive programs such as pensions due to the fixed nature of houses. (See below “The trade-off between Social policies and home ownership)

Housing and populism
Recently, several studies conducted in several European countries sought to determine the influence of housing on right-wing populist electoral results. While political spectrums and housing markets differ according to countries, studies highlight some cross-national trends.

Studies regarding the relationship between variation in house prices and populist electoral results have found that voters living in areas where house prices increased the least were more prone to vote for right-wing populist parties. One explanation may lie in the fact that as the housing map created winners (those owning in dynamic areas) and losers (those holding in less prosperous areas), those who experienced a relative decline in the value of their homes tended to feel left out of a significant component of household wealth formation, and therefore were inclined to favorite populist political parties which challenged a status quo that did not benefit them. In the UK, some have highlighted a correlation between the relative deflation of housing prices and an increased likelihood of voting in favor of Brexit. Research in France shows that those who saw their home prices increase tended to vote for candidates other than Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French presidential election. In Nordic countries, studies tend to come to similar findings, with data showing an inverse relationship between house price increases and support for right-wing populist parties. Those living in ‘left-behind’ areas (where house prices have decreased by 15%) tended to vote 10% higher for the Danish People’s Party than in ‘booming’ areas (where house prices have increased by 100% In Germany, studies show that die AfD scores are higher in areas where house prices have not risen as much as the average rate . Recent work by Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty seems to corroborate the existence of areas’ prosperity determinants in the vote for right-wing populist parties. Describing the Rassemblement National vote as “a vote of little-middle access to home ownership,” they argue that home ownership is twice as frequent in towns and villages as in cities . Such analysis, combined with previous presentations on house price variations, point in the direction that right-wing populist electoral results are, at least partly, driven by geosocial factors, with lower middle-class people living in less populated areas not feeling supported by traditional political parties and afraid of social downgrading.

Debates around intergenerational conflicts
Around Europe, debates around generational inequalities have been the subject of several news outlets. Regarding ownership inequality in Europe, data points to a positive relationship between age and home ownership. In England, those over 65 owned 35.8% of all houses in 2022, while they only represented 18.6% of the population in 2021. In Germany, 50.4% of 60-69-year-olds owned their homes, while only 18.4% of 20-29-year-olds did. As older people tend to have more time to accumulate wealth, academics highlight that these inequalities are wider than decades ago. Research shows that such inequalities exist due to a significant increase in housing prices to the annual income, also known as the wealth-to-income ratio. (See below Wealth-to-Income Ratio) Data collected from the Bank of England show that, in 1982, a house cost, on average, only 4.16 times an average British person’s annual income, but it has now climbed to 8.68 times the yearly income in 2023. Several European countries enacted in the 1990s different public policies aimed to promote home ownership. In the UK during the 1980s, the Thatcher premiership passed the ‘right to buy scheme,’ which saw 3 million council houses sold at a price between 30% and 70% below market prices. In France, liberal housing policies gained ground in the 1970s, enabling the rise of residential suburbs. Nonetheless, some have also nuanced the extent to which countries have uniformly incentivized homeownership during that period. Studies on Nordic countries have highlighted the difference in housing models promoted by public policies, arguing that while Norway has been promoting cooperative and private ownership, it has not so much been the case with Denmark, which has, for example, institutionalized nonprofit renting.

Academics have also pointed out that the strain on capital accumulation that resulted from WWII and post-war era interventionist and redistributionist policies have helped workers – i.e., those who earn a large share of their income through work, to earn a larger share of national income, translating into a greater ability to become homeowners. Such theories would tend to favor the idea that intergenerational homeownership inequalities are more a product of class-based inequalities than intergenerational inequalities as such, as young people struggle to a larger extent not because older people have ‘hoarded’ the housing market but because the capital class, which is not constituted via age but rather by intra-familial transfers and wealth accumulation, have exploited the labor class to a greater extent since the end of the 1970s. In line with this argument, some highlight the importance of considering intragenerational housing wealth inequalities; studies regarding the UK have demonstrated that such household housing wealth inequalities are the most important within the baby-boomer generation, suggesting limits to the intergenerational divide theories.

While several news outlets have framed a growing generational conflict around housing ownership, some studies have argued that if, from an objective perspective, millennials recognized that baby boomers were better off, a relational analysis demonstrated that they did not resent the older generation for their situations but rather the government for out-of-touch policies. As for the baby boomers, they tended to resent sympathy for the younger generations, recognizing that they were facing more significant barriers to home ownership. Similarly, research argues that if the probability of housing being a personal issue significantly decreases with age, the tendency to consider it a country-wide problem, i.e., a public policy issue, remains similar across generations, which would tend to affirm the prominence of inter-generational solidarity rather than inter-generational conflict.