While the financialisation of real estate has emerged in political science as a critical dimension of Neoliberal restructuring of European economies, less attention has been given to its underlying regulatory conditions at the EU level and the role of corporate power in shaping them. This study fills the gap by using a Bayesian process tracing analysis to examine how corporate structural power, lobbying, and salience interact in the regulation of the EU insurance industry, and how this affects real estate investments and structured financial products. We advance and empirically test an explanatory mechanism to investigate the deployment of structural power as a critical lobbying resource for business groups in shaping policymakers’ understandings of regulation in different contexts of political salience. We collected and analysed legislative and documental sources, and conducted 20 interviews with stakeholders and policymakers, related to the Solvency II and Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision directives and their reforms from 2010 to 2022. Our findings demonstrate how the real estate finance industry secures its preferred outcomes when it leverages structural power through lobbying and is perceived by EU policymakers as credible and salient. Conversely, its efforts are only partially or largely unsuccessful when these conditions are unmet. This article refines the scholarly conceptualisation of the interactions among structural power, lobbying, and salience and sheds light on corporate power in EU real estate finance.

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How do the dual trends of increased misinformation in politics and increased socioeconomic inequality contribute to an erosion of trust and confidence in democratic institutions? In an era of massive misinformation, voters bear the burden of separating truth from lies as they determine how they stand on important issue areas and which candidates to support. When candidates engage in misinformation, it uncouples the already weak link among vote intentions, candidate choice, and policy outputs. At the same time, high levels of economic inequality and social stratification may contribute to lower levels of institutional trust, and the correspondingly more insular socioeconomic groups may experience misinformation differently. Social policy, as a policy area intentionally designed to alleviate risk and redistribute resources, thus becomes a special case where the effects of misinformation and socioeconomic inequality may be crosscutting and heightened.

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This chapter situates the housing affordability crisis spreading in different European countries within the political economy of neoliberal capitalism and as a core dimension of the European polycrisis. To this aim, a critical political economy framework is developed to analyse the structural, social, and political dimensions of the housing affordability crisis. The chapter thus reconstructs the conflicts and crisis-prone tendencies of residential capitalism, as the premise to investigate neoliberal housing policy and its tensions. According to this perspective, the current housing crisis must be analysed as the disruption of a homeownership-led hegemonic project which served as a pillar of the broader neoliberal hegemonic offensive. The limits in the housing reform agendas that emerged in the wake of the pandemic point to the structural difficulties in steering a viable political mediation between the dominant rent-extraction logic in residential capitalism and the need for housing as a primary condition for social reproduction.

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High-quality, affordable housing is critical for society because it improves health, financial freedom, independence, and household stability and security. Homeownership can also promote wealth building for low-income households. Yet past studies on welfare state reform paid little attention to housing despite a large body of literature focusing on housing policy, its determinants, and its social consequences. Two primary theoretical approaches to understanding housing systems imply that reform trends indicate either possible convergence or the absence of it, though they do not specifically focus on change. There are still some differences among European housing markets; however, no country seems to have escaped the process of financialization, recommodification, and residualization that contribute to housing unaffordability. These policy-driven changes affect politics and impact important subgroups like low-income households and young people.

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Affordable housing is a pressing political problem that seems to be fueling social unrest among young people. Rising rents, expensive property prices, and stagnant wages leave young adults with few prospects of entering the housing market without intergenerational financial support. In this article, we examine the role of homeownership, housing unaffordability, and intergenerational transfers in explaining welfare preference and voting behavior of young European adults. We propose the emergence of a new growing interest group composed of financially overburdened young renters and mortgaged homeowners whose welfare is increasingly threatened. We bridged HFCS 2017 and ISSP 2016 datasets through statistical matching and used ordered and multinomial logit models to analyze these trends in Belgium, Germany, France, and Slovakia. We find that homeownership polarizes young adults in terms of their welfare support. Housing unaffordability, however, coalesces young homeowners and renters by increasing redistribution support.

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Housing policy in the twenty first century has been characterised as following a neoliberal, asset-driven paradigm. Are signs of a policy paradigm crisis emerging? Combining political economy research on institutional and ideational change, this article develops a theoretical and analytical framework to map and assess change and continuity. It applies the framework to a comparative case study of 147 housing policy measures introduced in the Netherlands (56), Spain (47), and Germany (44) from 2009 to 2022. We find evidence that, while key tenets of the neoliberal paradigm remain resilient, a renewed role of the state has led to a policy paradigm crisis in the three countries, albeit to different degrees. The outcome of the crisis sets the stage for either a more socially embedded readaptation of the existing ‘housing-as-asset’ paradigm or a major shift towards one characterised by ‘housing-as-social-right’.

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Despite increasing rent price burdens throughout Europe, many eligible households for rental subsidies do not use them. Understanding determinants of low take-up is crucial for evaluating program effectiveness and anticipating fiscal implications. To identify those determinants, we built an extended version of the theory of planned behaviour, incorporating dimensions from the claiming costs scale. In an online survey, participants comprising renting households likely eligible for the housing subsidy from Germany (n = 862) and Spain (n = 1032) completed measures of behavioural intention, rental cost burdens, theory of planned behaviour constructs (attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, and past behaviour), and claiming costs constructs (information costs, process costs, and stigma). Results supported a multi-group model, showing different paths for Germany and Spain. Several similar paths were identified for both countries, such as the indirect association of stigma with intention to apply for rental subsidies via attitude, the positive and strong association of subjective norms, and the positive association between perceived behavioural control and intention. The indirect relationship involving information costs was observed for Spain but not Germany, and rental cost burdens operated differently as well. These findings suggest that multiple dimensions, both psychological and policy-related, should be considered when investigating claiming behaviours for rental subsidies, while emphasizing the need to acknowledge the unique characteristics of each country. This evidence is also relevant to policymakers, offering insights into leveraging established policy tools.

Housing regime typologies represent a key conceptual construct in the comparative housing research literature, whose classificatory and explanatory capacity is still the subject of lively debate. The variety of methods and results amassed in the field, alternatively dismissing or supporting their usefulness, makes it difficult to discern the classificatory and explanatory power of various housing regime approaches. To this aim, this study offers a systematic literature review of housing regime theorization and its applications. In doing so, we make a case for the use of systematic literature reviews in housing studies, still rare in the field. We thus map, compare and evaluate the use of such typologies by looking at how they were used in clustering national housing systems, and in empirical research testing the regime-related hypotheses. Our results point to the enduring relevance of housing regime theory in comparative housing research, although from a historically grounded perspective.

What resources help young people secure homeownership and housing wealth? We combine findings from two literatures, one which emphasizes the role of income, education, and inheritances and one which emphasizes the role of financial strategies, to evaluate whether a more comprehensive set of resources help young people aged 18–45 navigate the housing market in the United States. Using the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and through logistic and Heckman regressions, we identify three main findings. First, financial strategies such as financial knowledge, credit card access, and financial risk-taking help explain homeownership and housing wealth for young people, over and above traditionally studied household and family resources. These are especially important for middle-income households. Second, different financial strategies matter for homeownership versus housing wealth. Third, ‘optimal’ financial strategies like good savings habits may not always be associated with success in the housing market. Combined, these findings imply that while in theory young people can leverage resources beyond their own income or the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, in practice the ideal combination is complex. To capture this complexity, we introduce the term ‘acquisition capital’ to represent the multiple sets of resources that young people leverage to secure homeownership and housing wealth.

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Inequality is one of the defining issues of our time, and social scientists have consistently confirmed that housing is a key driver of contemporary inequalities. How then, should we talk about housing as part of a constellation of economic and social inequalities plaguing contemporary Europe? There are at least three ways to probe this question. The first way is conceptual: how do today’s housing challenges fit within a discussion of citizens’ social and legal rights? The second way is empirical: how are housing inequalities felt at different points along the income distribution? The final way is political: how are public policies driving or mitigating the inequalities that we see today? This article examines each approach and highlights the need to integrate these distinct threads into a unified larger public discussion about housing and inequality.