Three Essays on the Political Economy of Housing

Abstract

How does housing affect politics? While an increasingly important topic for our soci-eties, the politics of housing remained a relatively obscure topic of research in quantitative political science until relatively recently. In this dissertation, I explore how different as- pects of the housing question induce shifts in political attitudes and values. The first essay explores the electoral effects of rent pressure and rent control by leveraging a natural exper- iment in Catalonia. The second essay re-examines the traditional question of the effect of homeownership on political attitudes and electoral preferences from a new dynamic point of view accounting for the life cycle of individuals. The third essay develops a general frame- work to understand the political economy of tourism, especially as it refers to its housing aspects, and runs an original survey to test its prediction. The results obtained highlight the importance of housing, whether understood as tenure or as the effects of its rising prices for renters, in mediating political attitudes and electoral preferences in the developed world