Legislating Landlords and Homeowners: Private Interests, Issue Emphasis, and Policy Positions

Do private interests influence politicians’ behaviour in parliament? Focusing on homeownership, we extend prior work on personal wealth and policymaking. Legislators who own property may avoid talking about housing policy and take different positions on this issue. The case of Ireland allows us to study these questions since all Irish politicians need to declare their private holdings. We construct a novel dataset of homeownership status between 2013 and 2020, a period characterised by rising house prices and rent. Next, we use quantitative text analysis to identify mentions of housing policy in over 390,000 tweets and 330,000 parliamentary questions. Politicians from left-wing parties and urban areas prioritise issues related to housing and rent. Against our expectations, legislators who own property do not avoid the issue and their positions do not differ from non-homeowners. Our results have important implications for the relationship between private interests on legislative behaviour.