Do Changes in Constituency House Prices Change How MPs Speak About Housing?

• In Event: European Political Economy

Abstract

The past couple of decades advanced industrial democracies have seen a rapid, yet unequal, surge in housing prices. Scholars are increasingly examining the role played by home ownership and house prices in shaping the political behaviour of voters, leaving aside the question of whether these factors alter elected politicians’ views and expressed preferences on welfare issues in general, and housing in particular. How and why do political elites change their stance on housing policy? Using innovative text analysis methods and the case of the Great Britain, this paper shows for the first time that housing prices across constituencies influence the discourse of Members of Parliament representing these constituencies. Relying on a combination of Structural Topic Modelling and dictionary methods applied to a corpus made up of all parliamentary speeches since 1997, we identify three main policy issues: housing supply, housing demand, and welfare-related concerns. We then assign each individual speech a score reflecting how much the MP cares about this specific matter; and proceed to model the relationship between issue prevalence, median house price and partisanship. Our findings suggest that the topic prevalence gap between parties varies with house prices at the constituency level, even when controlling for constituency-level socioeconomic factors. Higher housing prices in an MP’s constituency are associated with more expressed concern for demand for housing for Labour MPs than for Conservative ones; while the reverse is true for housing supply. These results provide new insights into the determinants of political elites' expressed preferences on welfare and housing, and show that MP’s react to changes in their constituents living conditions.

Authors

• Ben William Ansell, University of Oxford

• Jacob Nyrup, University of Oslo

• Laure Sarah Bokobza, Nuffield College, University of Oxford