Housing inequality is intrinsically linked with populism

However, existing research has completely overlooked the single most important determinant of people’s everyday welfare, the largest asset on their household balance sheets, and the driver of massive macroeconomic instability over the last two decades: housing. Like trade and technological change, the housing market has had a profound impact on the distribution of winners and losers across advanced capitalist economies. Some homeowners, based in booming global cities, have profited handsomely from rapid house price inflation; others, based in regions of economic decline, have weathered a housing crash that sent them into negative equity, foreclosure, and increased risk of depression (McLaughlinet al.2012). Indeed, while there is broad recognition that the housing market played an important role in the financial crisis (Rajan2010), and broad recognition that the financial crisis has played an important role in the political economy of populism (Rodrik2017), there is not a single study to our knowledge that has examined the impact of housing market dynamics on populist vote share. This article aims to fill that gap in the literature. We examine two recent elections with a salient populist dimension:Britain’s 2016 referendum on membership to the European Union and France’s Presidential Election in 2017. Across both, we show that the WEST EUROPEAN POLITICS345 housing market is closely tied to populist electoral outcomes: areas that have gained from house price inflation are far less likely to vote for populist causes or parties than areas that have been excluded from those gains. We run our analyses at both the local and the individual levels, control-ling for a range of key variables in the populism literature, including age, income, gender, and education. We show that housing has a strong effect on populist support independent of these socio-economic and demo-graphic factors. Our findings make contributions to both the housing literature and the populism literature. Several studies have explored the link between house prices and voters’ preferences over party choice (Verberg2000) and so-called ‘first-dimension’(material) issues like trade (Scheve and Slaughter2001)and welfare expenditures (Ansell2014). Yet very little attention has been paid to how housing markets affect preferences along the‘ second dimension’(group-based) of politics, which dominates new populist movements and, through them, much of contemporary West European politics (Jagers and Walgrave2007). We develop a novel theory of housing and its impact on voters ’sense of exclusion from the economic and cultural changes over the last quarter-century. In doing so, we help to bridge the economic and cultural explanations of populist appeal. Several recent studies attempt a horserace between these explanations, evaluating the relative impact of indicators like house-hold income and attitudes toward immigration (Inglehart and Norris2017; Rodrik2017). On the basis of these measurements, some scholars have concluded that the‘ economic inequality’ perspective is largely invalid (Inglehart and Norris2017). Our findings suggest that economic inequality is an indispensable explanation of the populist vote, but were frame our understanding of inequality in geographical terms. The housing market structures the political map by locking people into–or out of–different climates of fortune: in some areas, a housing boom inspires optimism; in others, a housing bust fosters a sense of exclusion–not only from the gains of their neighbours, but also from the areas where housing is no longer affordable to them. It is in these latter areas, we show, that the culture of resentment thrives (Cramer2016), clearing the way for populist candidates. Housing has clear material winners and losers, but its geographic fixity also means that houses are embedded in local communities, and voters ’sense of self-understanding and group identity flows from these local conditions. Diverging fortunes in the housing mar-ket can activate both sets of concerns and thereby drive voters’ satisfaction with the political status quo. In the next section, we develop a theory of the relationship between the housing market and local populist appeal. In the third section, we346D. ADLER AND B. ANSELL describe the methods that we employ to examine this relationship. In the fourth and fifth sections, we examine the data from Britain’s referendum on EU membership and the French presidential election of 2017, conduct-ing analyses of both local electoral outcomes and individual vote choice. The sixth section concludes by drawing out broader lessons.