Turning Right? Homeowners and Partisan Preferences in Germany

Rising housing wealth inequalities and their partisan dynamics have received more research attention recently (Ansell, 2014; Wind et al., 2017), although mainly in liberal market economies with high homeownership rates. There has been a lot of theorising that homeowners are more conservative (André et al., 2018; Kingston et al., 1984), but when controlling for their social characteristics the homeownership effect diminishes. Ansell (2014) has shown that left homeowners maintain a preference for redistributive policies in a two-party system. Yet, André et al. (2018) have shown that party choice of homeowners is more complex in multiparty systems like the Netherlands and we know much less about other multiparty systems (e.g. Kohl & Hadziabdic, forthcoming). This paper addresses this research gap by analysing if homeowners in the German multiparty system become more conservative. More specifically, are voters of the radical left (Die Linke) turning towards the centre left (social democrats, green party) once they become homeowners? The paper analyses the relationship between housing wealth and political preferences by applying survival analysis for the first time in this research context. The analysis is based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) from 2002-2018. In the first analytical step the paper maps and describes the partisan preferences of homeowners. In the second step the survival of left partisan preferences among recent homeowners is analysed. The statistical analysis focusses on homeowners who were renters in the previous wave and their likelihood to prefer more conservative parties in consecutive waves. Survival analysis will estimate the likelihood to hold on to left and redistributive preferences over time, given the actual more privileged wealth position (for a housing-related application see Wood et al., 2017). The hypothesis is that homeowners turn towards more conservative parties the longer they own property and the survival analysis will reveal the extend of this effect and the potential lagged effect over time. Specifically, this analysis will develop a series of fine-grained survival models that estimate the stability of partisan preferences within the left spectrum (see André et al., 2018 for the Netherlands).