This week we’re looking at the electoral politics of housing. Does whether you own or rent your home affect how you vote? And is this relationship changing over time?
For decades, political scientists believed that a person’s occupation was the strongest predictor of how they would vote. Manual, working-class jobs were associated with left-wing voting, while white-collar professions leaned right.
In recent years, however, this class-based model has been challenged. Education level and age now often predict voting behaviour more accurately than occupation, alongside the growing importance of cultural and identity-based issues such as immigration, gender, and morality.
But does this mean economic status no longer matters in politics? According to new research, the answer is no. Economic status remains a powerful predictor of voting behaviour - but the foundations of that status have changed. Rather than occupation, housing has emerged as a central factor shaping political preferences.
In this episode, Prof Alan Renwick explores this shift with Josh Goddard, a PhD student in the UCL Department of Political Science, whose research sheds new light on how housing has become a key driver of political divides.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics and this week we are looking at the electoral politics of housing. Does whether you own or rent your home affect how you vote, and is this relationship changing over time?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
It used to be said that if you wanted to predict how a person would vote, the most important aspect of their lives to look at was their job. People in manual working class occupations tended to vote left, people in white collar middle class occupations tended to vote right. Recent decades have seen such class-based models of voting increasingly challenged. Indeed, today in many countries education and age are better predictors of voting behaviour than is occupation.
And the rise of factors such as education and age is often associated with the emergence of a new dividing line in politics based not around questions of economic policy, but rather around cultural and identity issues such as gender, immigration, and morality. But does all of this mean that economic status no longer matters in shaping voting patterns?
While a new study argues that it does not, it finds that such status remains a key predictor of voting behaviour. But what determines economic status has shifted. Whereas in the past, it was decided mainly by occupation, now that role has performed to a much greater degree than before by housing. The author of that study is Josh Goddard, a PhD student here in the UCL Department of Political Science, and I'm delighted that Josh joins me now.
Josh, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics. And let's start with the background to your research. What have we traditionally known, and I gave a bit of a hint of it in in the introduction there, but really be useful to have it in your own words, what have we traditionally known or thought that we have known about the role of class in shaping people's voting behaviour?
[00:02:19] Josh Goddard: Great. Thanks Alan. Yeah. So, as you alluded to there's a very big literature on the relationship between class and voting in political science and the kind of traditional, the, traditionally this literature has conceptualised your class position in terms of your position within the labour market so whether that be primarily your occupation or also potentially your income or your employment status. But yeah, the, the kind of the most significant section of this literature has looked at occupation and the traditional literature measured this in terms of a binary distinction between people with manual jobs working class jobs, and people with non-manual white collar middle class jobs. And as you identified, showed that there's been a decline in the relationship between membership of those groups and electoral behaviour.
Now, more recently, a kind of strand of literature emerged, which challenged this measurement of class or occupation structures and suggested that within these two groups, so within these two broadly defined middle class and working class groups, there is, there are other significant divides. So, and this literature is focused mainly on the middle class side of that and showing that within kind of white collar occupations, we can see a divide between people in kind of managerial positions and people in more kind of interpersonal professional positions, and this is commonly, these are, these roles are commonly called sociocultural professionals in the literature. And managers tend to remain more likely to support parties of the centre right in particular and sociocultural professionals have become more or, or are now more likely to support left leaning parties.
And I guess the literature has also interacted with changing party structure, party systems. So the increasing success of radical right parties and has identified that they have become, they have more support within the working class groups and also green and left libertarian parties and showing that they've become more popular amongst the kind of these sociocultural professionals.
But, even that kind of new literature, which critiqued the traditional literature retains a focus on the labour market and occupation. So it says this traditional binary operationalisation of labour markets is appropriate maybe for kind of industrial post-war societies. But now labour markets are far more complicated in a kind of the kind of post-industrial context, so we should look at them and measure them in different ways.
My study looks to kind of, take this, I guess a step further and say that, to understand contemporary patterns of inequality, or I guess what sociologists would would call social stratification, we, we might need to look beyond the labour market.
[00:05:00] Alan Renwick: Hmm. That's really helpful and really interesting. Just on that last point that you were getting to there, what actually is social class, what do we mean by social class? And and why is it that traditionally that has been linked so strongly to labour market position specifically?
[00:05:15] Josh Goddard: Well, I think there's different ways to think about it. So, what I take it to mean in the paper, I think is your kind of broader or your kind of position within the, or your kind of economic position within society. So how affluent or how secure you are or how poor or insecure you are in society. And I think there has also been traditionally this has interacted with a sense of identity. So I think maybe that is why the traditional focus was on occupation, but also I think that, I think, I do think the traditional focus on occupation is, was justified in far as your job really was the main determinant of your level of affluence, of your economic positioning, if you like.
[00:05:58] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:59] Josh Goddard: So, yeah.
[00:06:00] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And does that, was that the case everywhere? I mean, I, I guess I'm, I'm coming from a perspective of mainly thinking about UK politics and it's often been said that class is particularly important in UK politics or historically has been particularly important in UK politics. But do we find similar sorts of patterns across democracies?
[00:06:18] Josh Goddard: Yes, so we certainly see in terms of the relationship with voting, we, we certainly see a stronger relationship between your occupational class and voting across in my paper looks mainly at kind of, or looks at post-industrial Western societies and yeah, that is the pattern we traditionally see.
[00:06:37] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So why is it that you think that we should also look at housing? You were beginning to hint at that when you were suggesting that traditionally your job has been the main factor that shapes your economic fortunes. But I guess you were suggesting that that has changed in recent decades.
[00:06:52] Josh Goddard: Yeah, so I think there's been, a few kind of important transformations within housing markets over the past probably three or four decades. Again, in post-industrial societies, which have, had uneven Im impacts on different social groups. So some groups they've really helped, they've really advantaged and some groups they've disadvantaged.
And that therefore, kind of, how housing has become a significantly more important kind of driver of inequality or determinant of one's kind of class position in their societies. Now I identify three of the specific transformations in housing markets. And they are house price inflation, I show in the paper that house prices have grown massively relative to income, across advanced democracies over the past three or four decades, also housing financialisation, so the massive expansion of housing debt, and then also the,
[00:07:45] Alan Renwick: So mortgages, so people have much, much bigger mortgages now than was the case.
Absolutely, yeah.
[00:07:48] Josh Goddard: So people have like, or, or a significant group of people are heavily exposed to or are exposed to significantly higher levels of debt in the, in, in mortgage debt now.
[00:07:58] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:58] Josh Goddard: And then the third thing was the transformation of rental markets. So we've seen, kind of, a shrinking of social housing sectors and also the private rental sectors, or private rental sectors have generally, generally become more deregulated and insecure over time.
And I argue in the, that these three trends have interacted to drive significant inequalities between, or increase significant inequalities between housing market groups. And such that now yeah, your kind of your level of economic security or your affluence, or if you like I, I guess a sociologist would say your position in the class structure is increasingly determined by your housing market position and that has become more important over time relative to your labour market position.
[00:08:45] Alan Renwick: So that could mean, for example, you're on a person, you're a person who's on a fairly low income, perhaps in a an occupation that would've been regarded as working class occupation historically but you own your own house because may, maybe you're a little bit older, you got into the housing market in an earlier stage, and therefore you're suggesting actually, you're economically quite secure. And you might contrast that with someone who's younger, potentially on a higher income, potentially in a more kind of high status occupation, again, speaking in kind of traditional terms.
[00:09:17] Josh Goddard: Yeah.
[00:09:17] Alan Renwick: But who doesn't own their own home? Maybe there's, they're renting and therefore faces much greater insecurity economically.
[00:09:24] Josh Goddard: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, yeah, you're right to identify the kind of time specific nature of this change in order to explain this. So, I think yeah, what you've identified there is a growth in groups whose kind of labour market position is inconsistent, if you like, with the housing market position.
And yeah, as you identified, there's a significant group in societies now who have maybe lower incomes or have never had particularly high incomes, but because they bought a house at an earlier point when they were affordable in a, in particularly in an area of, in an area of their country, which has shown significant house price growth over recent times, they're now in relatively affluent housing market positions.
But if we just looked at their labour market position, they, they'd show up as being relatively insecure. And equally, yes, kind of, younger people, maybe professionals often in in cities might earn quite a good income, but increasingly find it difficult to obtain housing security or enter home ownership.
[00:10:16] Alan Renwick: So housing is a very strong factor in people's economic prospects, economic fortunes, economic status, and then you're, you are arguing that we should expect that would have an impact upon voting behaviour.
[00:10:29] Josh Goddard: Yeah, that's right. So, I, I, I kind of identify there's a kind of disconnect between these two things we've been talking about. So there's a disconnect between, on the one hand, the literature on class voting measures class in terms of or overwhelmingly in terms of your labour market position, whereas we've actually seen the growth of housing as a determinant of class. And I kind of want to, in a way begin to reconcile this kind of contradiction and integrate housing into these kind of broader debates about the shifting kind of social basis of politics, this shifting relationship between demographics and class and voting behaviour.
So yeah, I test the theory that because it's become more important as a determinant of your class position or your level of economic security or affluence, we might expect your there to be a significant relationship between housing market position and voting behaviour and for that, this will have grown over time.
[00:11:24] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So one of the hypotheses that you set out at the start of the paper is, is simply that we should expect to see some kind of relationship and that we should, and another of the hypotheses is that we should expect that relationship to have increased over time. But you also then go on to hypothesise specific relationships that you're expecting to find.
[00:11:44] Josh Goddard: Absolutely. So, and to kind of come up with these expectations, I rely on the on the literature, which we always already have a significant literature on housing and politics. I just don't think it, I don't think it's yet being integrated into these broader debates. But from this literature, we we know that your housing market position or your housing circumstances influences people's political attitudes, and primarily it does this along to at what I identify as attitudinal dimensions in the paper.
So the first is on, attitudes towards economic or welfare policy. And we might kind of, conventionally refer to this as the kind of traditional left right dimension. And typically, people in more affluent housing market positions, so homeowners but especially high value homeowners, outright owners and landlords as well, they traditionally have more right leaning views on this dimension. With, more, those in more insecure housing market positions, so renters having more left leaning views.
There's also a second attitudinal dimension, which is of importance. And I, I refer to this as the pro versus anti-system dimension and it captures levels of political disaffection. So I show that or the literature had traditionally had shown that, those in more affluent housing market positions, again, homeowners especially high value homeowners, et cetera they tend to have more pro system positions, whereas renters tend to have higher levels of disaffection.
So I think we can think of these different housing market groups as mapped out on these two dimensions. And we can also think of the, in terms, in order to generate expectations about how they vote, we can also think of, political parties or party families as occupying spaces on these dimensions as well. And those that are closer to the housing market positions to the housing market groups, you might expect to, to attract greater support from those housing market groups.
So for instance, centre right parties, I hypothesise, appear particularly well suited to attracting disproportionate support from those in more more affluent housing market groups, so from homeowners, because they tend to be right, right leaning on economic policy and also as kind of longstanding parties of government they seem well suited to attract pro system voters.
On the other side in, in terms of renters I, I theorise that it will be radical left parties that are best placed to disproportionately mobilise them. And that's because again, they have the most left leaning positions of the, of the party families, but also often display populist rhetoric and are well placed to appeal to anti-system voters. And as I, as I said earlier renters also tend to exhibit anti-system attitudes as well.
[00:14:27] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So you have kind of strong expectations for the relationship between housing market position and support for those two families of parties. So centre right parties and radical left parties. By contrast, the other various types of parties that, that they just don't quite match so closely any of these housing market groups.
[00:14:46] Josh Goddard: Yeah.
[00:14:46] Alan Renwick: So you're expecting that they, they support for them would be less affected by housing market position?
[00:14:52] Josh Goddard: Yes. So, exactly. So I, I don't expect the other party families to kind of consistently attract disproportionate or, or significantly disproportionate support from any housing market group.
[00:15:03] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So just to give an example of that, social democratic parties you see as being on the left in terms of economics, but actually being quite kind of pro system, being traditional parties that have been operating within the system for, for many decades. And because that doesn't map onto any of the housing groups very closely, you just think that support for social democratic groups would be mainly predicted by other factors.
[00:15:26] Josh Goddard: Yeah exactly. And also, and the kind of mirror of that we could think about radical right parties as being as, as exhibiting kind of antisystem positions, but also not being, not being left wing on economic policy. So not being, we, I wouldn't necessarily attract them to expect them to attract disproportionate support from renters.
[00:15:43] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And just one other aspect of this kind of set of expectations that we should just clarify before we move on to how you investigate these things is so you've set out two dimensions there of attitudes on different aspects of policy and I think probably quite a few of our listeners will be familiar with two dimensional models of the political spectrum, but with slightly different dimensions. So people will be used to the left right dimension, which was the first one that you set out there.
But then we often speak of a second dimension of politics being liberal versus conservative on more kind of social issues, so attitudes on gender questions, attitudes on immigration as well. That's different from your second dimension, isn't it? So you're not suggesting that housing is going to be a strong predictor of attitudes and preferences on that dimension?
[00:16:31] Josh Goddard: Yeah, that's right. So the evidence on that we have suggests that housing is not strongly predictive of attitudes on this. As you've got the kind of cultural dimension we could call it if you like.
[00:16:42] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:43] Josh Goddard: And that's also another reason to expect that parties that are kind of primarily, if you like, compete on that dimension, so whether that be radical right parties or social liberal parties, won't attract particularly disproportionate support from housing market groups because housing market groups, again, housing market position is not particularly determinative of support on that dimension.
[00:17:03] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Okay. It's good just to clarify that. Yeah. Great. Thank you. So there, there are various other nuances in your hypotheses. You have quite a kind of rich structure of expectations, but maybe we'll deal with those hypotheses that we've discussed so far. And if we've got time, maybe we'll get into some of the others when we are discussing the results.
But before we get to the results, of course, we need to know about the methodology that you use, how you go about investigating these questions. So what's the approach that you take in this paper?
[00:17:30] Josh Goddard: Well, I think a key challenge of this paper is simply the fact that the kind of typically used cross national survey sources, don't consistently or often at all, collect data on housing tenure. And I think that's part of the reason why we have a lot of these kind of studies for occupational class, but not for, not for housing.
So, I had to basically create two data sets and the first one allowed us, allows me to identify the kind of or measure the main division in housing markets that I identify that between homeowners and renters. And for this, I use I collect data from national election studies, so about a hundred of these surveys from 14 countries over the past 40 years. And that allows me to measure the how the relationship between housing tenure measured in terms of owners versus renters has and voting has changed over time and across countries.
I also identify in the paper other, divides within housing markets within these groups. So within the homeowner and renter groups relating on the owner side to house value whether you're an outright owner or have a mortgage and whether you're a landlord or not. And on the renter side, in terms of whether you are a social or private renter. And to capture these more, because the national election studies don't tend to capture these kind of more fine grain detailed if you like dimensions of your housing market position, I use household panel data from six countries to identify those.
So there's one data set which I use to measure the relationship between owners and renters. And the second one, which I use to go at these more fine grained housing market divides. And in terms of the methods used it's a primarily descriptive paper, so it, it's, I use, mainly logistic regression analysis. But importantly I kind of look at the relationships in both a bivariate setting. So just looking at the raw kind of simple relationship between the two, these two variables.
[00:19:32] Alan Renwick: So housing and voting.
[00:19:33] Josh Goddard: Yeah, housing and voting. Yeah. But I also consider it in a multivariate setting, by which I mean including control variables. And this is important because, it could be that, for instance, if I identified that the relationship between housing and voting has become more important over time people might say, well, is this not just the relationship, is this not just a reflection of the relationship between age and voting becoming more important over time? Because we know aging is, age is becoming increasingly associated with both housing and voting, housing position and voting. So I also have to look at, I also have to control for these other factors to just check that this, that the the findings that I get are not reflective of electoral realignment around other demographic characteristics.
[00:20:14] Alan Renwick: Great. So on then to the key question, what do you actually find, and shall we, shall we start off with that basic relationship between housing dichotomised between owners and renters on the one hand and voting behaviour on the other hand?
[00:20:29] Josh Goddard: Yeah. Great. So I find so, your housing tenure is important for voting and the specific relationships between tenure groups and parties that I, I hypothesise, I did find support for these.
So, homeowners are significantly more likely than renters to support centre right parties and renters are significantly more likely than homeowners to support radical left parties. And for both of these, I mean, today in the, in the last, in recent times. For the other party families, so for social democratic parties, radical right parties and green parties, renters are more likely, are slightly more likely to support them than homeowners even once you control for other characteristics but the relationships is far weaker. So it is the case that we see a significant housing based dividing electoral behaviour, and that is kind of given expression by two party families, the centre right on, one on the one hand, and the radical left on the other.
[00:21:25] Alan Renwick: And has that changed over time?
[00:21:27] Josh Goddard: Yeah, so this is I think this is kind of potentially the most striking finding I've found in the paper is that the the, these two relationships have become significantly stronger over time. So, for the centre, right, in the kind of 1980s, there's a relatively weak relationship between housing tenure and voting. And over time, this has grown significantly so that housing tenure is now very important and explains support for the centre right. And you see the mirror image for the radical left.
For a kind of measure of how important it's become, if you like, i, I find that, centre, I, I compare the effect of housing tenure to the effects of other demographic divides on voting for these party families. So I compare housing tenure to income, education, age, and occupational class, and I find that for both these party families, it is the most important thing. So it is absolutely central, I think, to understanding the kind of social basis of these two party families.
[00:22:25] Alan Renwick: Hmm. And then you look into the, the, the subcategories of housing tenure, so the different groups within homeowners and the, within renters, the socially and privately renting groups as well. What did you, I, I guess maybe we should just first clarify what you were expecting to find once you broke that down and then what you actually found.
[00:22:48] Josh Goddard: Yeah, so I was expecting there not just not just to find this divide between homeowners and renters, but also to, to find divides within this group, within these groups. So I was expecting, again, my expectations revolved around these two the two, these kind of two key party families. I expected high value homeowners to be especially supportive of centre right parties. I expected outright homeowners, homeowners who have paid off their mortgages to be especially supportive supportive of centre right parties. And also I expected private landlords to be especially supportive of centre right parties. I also hypothesised that social renters should be, or I expected them to be especially likely to support radical left parties as well.
[00:23:31] Alan Renwick: Compared with private renters.
[00:23:32] Josh Goddard: Private renters. Yes.
[00:23:33] Alan Renwick: And what's the logic there?
[00:23:35] Josh Goddard: So the logic there is that, again, we haven't got as much work on, on renters to draw on here, but one thing we do know about private renters is they are more likely to anticipate becoming homeowners over in the future. So I therefore expected them to behave slightly more like, like homeowners. And they do, but they still they still behave differently from homeowners.
[00:23:56] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:57] Josh Goddard: So yeah. And in terms of what we find there,
[00:23:59] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:59] Josh Goddard: We actually find that so looking at these three divides amongst homeowners, house value is the most important. So all of my expectations are actually, I find support for, so, I, I, so centre right parties do attract particularly strong support amongst high value homeowners, outright owners and landlords, but the effect is especially strong for house value.
I also find that low value homeowners are are more likely, are significantly more likely than high value homeowners to support the radical left. So, radical left parties, their, their support isn't limited to renters, it's, they also attract a good level of support amongst low, low value homeowners. They still attract more support than amongst private and social renters than amongst low value homeowners.
On the renter side, again, the, the relation, so there, there are differences between social and private renters, but they're slightly smaller. So private renters are more likely than social renters to support green parties, I find with social rent and also centre right parties, but they're, they show quite low levels of supports for both groups, for the centre right. And social renters are more likely than private renters to support social democratic and radical left parties.
[00:25:10] Alan Renwick: Hmm. And we should remember that these are findings that are across either 14 countries for, for the kind of dichotomy of owner versus renter or across, is it six countries you said for the the, the more fine grained analysis there.
Speaking personally, I suppose I'm particularly interested the results for the UK. We're sitting here in the UK. I guess many of our listeners might be particularly interested in the UK as well. And I'm kind of thinking, gosh, I really want to put this article on the reading list for my British Politics module because it's very directly related to some of the questions that we ask in relation to the UK in that module.
But so far you've been talking about findings that are kind of pooled across all of these various countries. If you did look simply at the UK, would you find the same picture that housing matters and that it has become more important in shaping voting behaviour over time?
[00:26:04] Josh Goddard: Well, that, this is a very interesting question. So, first of all, I might, I might just situate the UK as a case kind of within that, within my study. So I, I do predict that the relationship between housing and voting will be stronger in certain types of housing markets. And especially those within, within which the housing market transformations that I discussed at the start, that we discussed at the start were kind of most acute, so, in which, in which the house price inflation has been greater, rental market insecurity is greater.
Just because I expecting inequalities in between housing market groups to be greater in those societies. And typically these societies within the literature, are identified, I guess kind of the kind of English speaking countries, if you like. I label them the Anglo liberal group in the, in the, in the paper. And these are Britain, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. So I ex I, my, my prior expectation was for the relationship between housing and voting to be particularly strong in these countries and also probably to have grown most significantly in these countries.
So what I actually find is that there isn't a strong relationship. Or that the relationships, the strength of the relationship between housing and voting doesn't vary significantly across different housing market types. Within this, the UK.
[00:27:20] Alan Renwick: So there is a relationship between housing, housing type, and voting it's just that that relationship is broadly the same.
[00:27:27] Josh Goddard: Yes.
[00:27:27] Alan Renwick: Across these different countries.
[00:27:29] Josh Goddard: Yes. Absolutely. So housing, your housing tenure, for instance, seems to be roughly as important, indifferent, so in Anglo liberal housing markets as it is in other, as as it is in other housing markets.
[00:27:39] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:27:41] Josh Goddard: The UK itself is an outlier. So, I find that, so within all different types of housing markets, there has been a significant growth in the relationship between housing tenure and voting behaviour over time. We don't see this in Britain, Britain's an outlier in that it housing has always been very important or as long or at least insofar as my data goes back, so it goes back 40 years, it has always been a, a hugely important predictor of voting in Britain.
I shared your expectation, I guess, that I thought that this, it would be, I thought it would be I, I didn't really expect this. I expected because the housing kind of unaffordability is so acute in Britain I expected this, and it's become more acute over time, I expected this to be important.
But I think maybe it reflects the fact that housing has always been an important kind of class marker in British society. And maybe this is getting more into kind of social history, but I think it's quite intuitive that housing has always been an important kind of, I, I guess, a marker of status in Britain. We've always had a kind of large social housing sector in Britain at least since the war, for instance. And that's kind of been tied up, I guess with working class identity. I guess middle class aspirations have always been tied up within home ownership. So I think maybe it reflects at that, that the kind of unusual degree to which housing is important for class historically in Britain.
[00:29:02] Alan Renwick: And I guess it's also the case and your data go back to the mid 1980s. Yeah. And you can't remember the 1980s, but I can. And I mean, I can remember the 1980s as a period when, I mean, it may be that housing inequality hadn't quite reached the levels that it has reached now, but it was growing very rapidly, or at least it was perceived in the public discourse as growing very, very rapidly during that period, people period, and people were amazed by what was happening to high house prices and the nature of the housing market during that period, and then that was immediately followed by the crash of 1989.
And I mean, you were talking earlier about the increasing importance of mortgage debt as a factor. And I mean, I remember the early 1990s as a time when, when talk of negative equity.
[00:29:49] Josh Goddard: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:50] Alan Renwick: So people whose mortgage mortgages, their outstanding mortgages were bigger than the size than, than the value of their house because the house prices values had gone down. That was a big, big thing in that period to a degree that has never quite recurred actually since then. So I guess it may simply be that the, the UK in some ways moves earlier than some other places, and therefore it's already moved by the time of your early data in this analysis but if you were, if you were able to go back into the 1970s and 1960s, perhaps you would see a different picture in the UK as well.
[00:30:23] Josh Goddard: Yes. I think that's, yeah, I think that's probably right. I also think you identify how kind of housing was important even in the, in the 1980s and uh, or growing as an important, as a kind of predictor of your social position. That also meant that it was also kind of, very politicised in the 1980s as well, right? So we had a, the right to buy scheme uh
[00:30:43] Alan Renwick: Mm-hmm
[00:30:43] Josh Goddard: Of the Thatcher government being a highly, kind of, contested political issue. So I guess housing was always a kind of central political question in, in a way that maybe it wasn't in other countries. So that might be another way to explain that.
[00:30:55] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Fascinating, fascinating. We've learned so much from this study already. What more is there to explore you? This is part of your wider PhD project but what, what other questions are you seeking to explore in relation to this?
[00:31:09] Josh Goddard: So, more broadly, I want to extend this analysis, not just to look at class voting, but class politics more generally. So, in this paper we've, I've kind of identified that housing has grown significantly relative to occupation as a predictor of voting, and maybe therefore the nature of class voting has changed from revolving around occupational and labour markets to revolving around housing markets.
I'm also going to consider that in relation to other, other aspects of class politics. So, political attitudes and looking at whether, we don't have much analysis on how the relationship between your attitudes towards, for instance the kind of left right issues like redistribution welfare have changed over time. So I'm going to consider whether this has grown, also growing over time and whether it's growing relative to occupation. And this might perhaps help to explain some of the relationships we see in this paper.
And I'm also going to look at the role of political parties. So if the kind of underlying, kind of, if you like, social base of class politics is changing, is that reflected in how parties politicise economic policy or welfare politics? So, and I'm going to, I and I explore whether parties increasingly politicise housing as an issue, increasingly politicise divides between housing market groups, and whether they've become more polarised on housing policy over time.
[00:32:41] Alan Renwick: And will that help us understand the why in all of these relationships? Because you're, you're very modest in how you describe your findings so far in the paper, and you've indicated it during this episode as well, that you talk about the findings as descriptive findings, in which you see a relationship, a correlation between housing tenure and voting patterns, but you avoid making any causal claims about why it might be exactly that this relationship exists. Will, will that further analysis allow you to go into that why question?
[00:33:12] Josh Goddard: Yes, I think so. So I think that if it's true that housing has become more important as a kind of determinant of affluence, it, we also expect it to be true that it's become more important in terms of whether you support redistribution, for instance, if we kind of hypothesise that homeowners have become relatively better off over the years, we might expect them to become relatively more right wing on economic policy.
And this would help to explain why their voting behaviour has also become more right wing and equally, yes, in the role of political parties. So there's some theories in political science which suggest that kind of social cleavages or social divides need to be, in order for them to become, to be expressed politically, they need to be mobilised by political parties.
So is it the case that, parties have kind of noticed this change in the class structure that's happened and said, oh, there's these growing groups at the kind of polarised ends of housing markets, if you like. So there's a growth of group of kind of affluent housing market groups and a growth of those in insecure housing market groups, these are potential electoral groups for me to mobilise, for us to mobilise. And have they moved? Or polarising their housing market positions in order to mobilise these groups? And is that playing a part in the growth of housing as an electoral divide, which I've identified here?
[00:34:29] Alan Renwick: And indeed, we do seem to see some parties, particularly centre right parties and perhaps liberal parties as well, kind of, associating themselves, if you like, with NIMBY approaches to housing and green parties, radical left parties, to some extent social democratic parties such as Labour in the UK associating themself with a kind of YIMBY idea of wanting more housing to be built.
[00:34:54] Josh Goddard: Yes. So I have already done some analysis for this. And interestingly, I kind of shared your, I shared your prior, if we look at party manifestos, they have not actually become more polarised in their, in their positions on house building.
[00:35:06] Alan Renwick: Huh?
[00:35:07] Josh Goddard: They have become more polarised in their positions on other facets of housing policy. So for instance, on the taxation of wealth and housing assets. So on this, centre right parties have moved more to the right in their policy positions and in their rhetoric over time, whereas parties of the left have moved toward to the left on these.
We see the same thing in social house buildings specifically but also private rental market regulations. So we are seeing that, we're seeing that parties of the left, especially radical left and green parties, becoming more in favor of rent controls, for instance, and stronger tenancy protections and centre right, but also interestingly, radical right parties becoming more opposed to these.
[00:35:51] Alan Renwick: Hmm. Well, thank you so much, Josh. You're giving us a tantalising glimpse there for some further work beyond the study that we've been examining today. So we'll look forward very much to having you back on the podcast when you've developed that further. But this has been terrific. I've learned so much and this is definitely going on my reading list for the British Politics module. So thank you so much.
We have been discussing the article Housing and Electoral Behaviour: The Changing Face of Class Voting in Advanced Democracies by Josh Goddard, published in the February 2026 issue of the journal Electoral Studies, but it's already available free of charge online. And as ever, we'll put full details in the show notes for this episode.
We will be back with more cutting edge political science research next week. I think we're going to be talking about ways of tackling disinformation on social media, but I'm not completely sure, so watch this space.
And to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple, Google Podcasts or whatever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us too.
I'm Alan Renwick This episode was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.