Tenure-Trust Paradox: A Longitudinal Approach to Housing Tenure and Generalized Trust in Six European Countries

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 16. Social Ties and Collective Efficacy

Abstract

Stratification scholars have pointed at homeownership as a driving factor in the decline of working-class power i.e. the privatism thesis. This thesis implies homeowners would have a lower level of generalized trust than tenants. A competing explanation in trust studies is that homeowners would have a higher level of generalized trust than tenants i.e. the better citizen thesis. Most previous empirical studies find inconclusive results and are vulnerable to the possible time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity bias by relying on a cross-sectional research design. This study uses longitudinal data from the Generations and Gender Survey, conducted in six European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Lithuania, Austria, and Germany). We find that homeownership and housing quantity are positively associated with generalized trust across different housing regimes in pooled cross-sectional models. However, fixed-effect models show that the null or even negative association between tenure and trust depending on analytic samples and housing regimes. These seemingly paradoxical results confirm concerns of the endogeneity of the housing effect and reveal the importance of family structure, particularly living with one’s parents, in investigating the housing effect.

Authors

• Hyungjun Suh, Univeristy of Arizona

• Stéfanie André, Radboud University