Drivers of Change in Housing-Related Family Policies: a Long-Run European Comparison

While European welfare states have been subject to significant retrenchment and restructuring since the 1970s, its different segments have been affected by the process in diverse ways. Whereas housing policy has been scaled down, family policy has expanded in the same period. Several studies have investigated the drivers of these changes in family policy and housing policy separately in the comparative social policy literature. The political mobilisation of women was the key driving force behind family policy, and strong left-wing parties played a crucial role in the expansion of family policy in the past. However, the effect of partisanship has weakened in recent decades and ideational change regarding female labour has been identified as an increasingly important determinant of the expansion of family policy (Ferragina & Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015). Housing policy was originally argued to evolve in line with the general development trajectory of the welfare state. In the postwar decades, housing became most decommodified in countries marked by a high housing shortage, strict rent control and high social expenditure while commodification has been significant since the 1970s in most European countries (Aalbers, 2016; Kholodilin et al., 2024). More recently, the impact of the welfare state on housing policy is argued to have reversed in recent decades and more generous welfare states “buying time” (Streeck, 2014) are characterised by higher liberalisation of mortgage lending indicating higher commodification of housing (Blackwell & Kohl, 2019; Van Gunten & Kohl, 2020). Although housing policy measures targeting families with children have been adopted in a variety of countries, the development of this hybrid policy field has been little explored in the literature. The paper seeks to fill this gap through the analysis of a leximetric database containing data about 100 years of legislation and the literature regarding housing policies targeting families with children in nine countries. The study explores the drivers of the expansion of housing family policies through measuring the effect of GDP per capita, the fertility rate, ideological position of governments, and government deficit. Further, the determinants of countries’ different policy orientations—such as pronatalism, gender inequality and means testing—are also examined. The paper finds that none of the independent variables explain the expansion of housing family policy, however, the analysis confirms the significance of some of them with regard to policy orientation. Whereas pronatalism is negatively affected by GDP, targeting to the needy is positively influenced by both GDP and government deficit. On the one hand, results suggest that the expansion of housing family policies has not been primarily driven by socio-economic developments, confirming earlier findings regarding the crucial rise of the successful mobilisation of pronatalist actors in the emergence of this hybrid policy field. On the other hand, higher wealth is found to have an effect on the decline of pronatalism and an increase in selectivity in line with changes observed in other segments of Western European welfare states.