Housing Policy

This article asks whether local housing-market shifts help explain radical right support by linking geo-referenced panel survey data to postcode-level rent changes in Germany. It reports that rising local rents are associated with greater radical right voting, especially among lower-income, long-term residents and predominantly in urban areas. The piece highlights urban development and rent appreciation as a distinct correlate of anti‑establishment voting separate from labor-market threats.

Citizens in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) submitted frequent housing-related petitions to the state. The central question is whether those petitions produced tangible improvements in livelihoods by influencing where new housing was built.

This paper asks whether voters’ affect toward groups made salient by housing policy explains opposition to new development and reforms. Drawing on symbolic politics theory, the authors test whether dislike of developers, investors, government approvers, or incoming residents helps account for anti-development preferences—especially for policies that are not tied to a specific local project. The contribution is experimental and causal: the authors report evidence from survey experiments and short-form video manipulations that link affect toward these actors to policy judgments.

Lotteries are often proposed to allocate government benefits when demand outstrips supply: they can be simple, impartial, and can enable rigorous impact evaluations. Yet public acceptance of using lotteries for real-world beneficiary selection is not well understood.