The Interplay between Economic Inequality Trends and Housing Regime Changes in Advanced Welfare Democracies

A New Research Agenda

In this paper, I argue that our understanding of the increase in economic inequality in advanced welfare de- mocracies could be enhanced by taking account of the changes which took place in the housing regimes of many countries. I demonstrate how one could derive testable hypotheses concerning a direct relationship between both social trends, which can at least theoretically go in both directions (i.e. changing housing regimes influencing inequality trends, or inequality trends influencing characteristics of housing regimes), while the ‘classical’ driving forces of increasing inequalities function as intermediate variables in a multivariate model. Alternatively, a simple interaction model could guide future research, in the sense that social trends which are routinely considered as ‘driving forces’ of increasing economic inequality – but altogether do not explain that much of the observed long- term trend – could theoretically work out in a different way under different housing regimes.