From Intense Preferences to Political Participation: The (Local) Politics of Housing

• In Event: Comparative Politics Lightning Round

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 will present preliminary findings 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. 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.

Author

• Sophia Wang, Yale University