Why Parties Displace Their Voters: Gentrification, Coalitional Change, and the Demise of Public Housing

Abstract

Across advanced economies, affordable housing shortages are pushing low-income voters out of cities. Left governments frequently exacerbate these shortages by eliminating public housing. Why does the Left pursue policies that displace its voters? We argue that the Left’s long-term rebalancing towards the middle class and away from an increasingly stigmatized “underclass” has significantly attenuated the trade-offs inherent in reducing affordable housing. Focusing on the UK, we demonstrate that by alienating low-income voters politically and reshuffling them across districts, housing crises have significant costs for Labour. Yet, drawing on interviews, we show that displacement is nonetheless compatible with electoral interests: the displaced make room for richer voters whom politicians believe will also support Labour. A quantitative analysis of Greater London’s 32 local authorities and 624 wards further documents trends in line with coalitional rebalancing. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that electoral foundations are key to understanding housing crises and gentrification.

Residential Constraints and the Political Geography of the Populist Radical Right: Evidence from France

“…53 This dynamic is far from limited to France. The Left in Britain, for example, has played a major role in the growing salience of residential constraints: by increasingly catering to wealthier urban voters, it has contributed to the decline of affordable public housing and has made cities unaffordable to lower-income citizens (Chou and Dancygier 2021). Hypothetically, mainstream parties could successfully capitalize on these issues in terms that have little to do with immigrants or other transnational actors.…”

Does Rent Control Turn Tenants Into NIMBYs?

“…First, we add to a broader literature on housing politics. The literature has mostly focused on the interplay of housing and inequality (Flynn and Schwartz 2017), segregation and sorting (Gingrich and Ansell 2014), and voting behavior (Chou and Dancygier 2021;Enos 2016). We advance this literature by exploring the effects of a pivotal policy intended to improve affordable housingrent control-and its impact on NIMBYism.…”

Are Irish voters moving to the left?

“…Sinn Féin also won more votes among the under 35s than Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil combined (Figures A1-A3). Unequal access to housing has been found to increasingly influence electoral politics within advanced capitalist democracies (see Ansell, 2019;Chou & Dancygier, 2021). Urban cities with a concentration of high-growth multinationals tend to have rapidly growing house prices, high levels of market income inequalities, and very unequal access to housing wealth (Fuller, Johnston, & Regan, 2020;Iversen & Soskice, 2019;Piketty, 2018).…”