How does owning your home or renting impact on how you vote? For today’s podcast, Ben was joined by Shaun Ratcliff and Josh Goddard to discuss what we know about how home ownership (or asset ownership more broadly) influences voting trends. We discuss Josh’s research looking at 14 different Western democracies, and also hear from Shaun about more research closer to home.
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Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast. I’m Ben Raue. Housing is one of the big issues in politics, not just in Australia, but across the Western world. Where you live and the value of your home is fundamental to a person’s lifestyle and position. As homes have increased in value, asset ownership has fundamental to someone’s position in society. And there is increasing evidence that home ownership tells us more about how someone might vote than their income or their job.
Today we’ve got two experts on to talk about what the research tells us. My first guest is Josh Goddard. Josh is a PhD student in political science at University College London, focused on political economy and voting behaviour. Hello Josh.
Josh: Hi, Ben.
Ben: And my second guest is Shaun Ratcliff. Shaun is the principal of Accent Research and an honorary associate at the University of Sydney. Hello, Shaun.
Shaun: Hi Ben, how you going?
Ben: In Australia we’ve seen data in recent years indicating that whether you own your own home has a large influence on how you vote. In the 2022 Australian Election Study, the combined Labor and Greens primary vote was 18 percentage points higher amongst renters than homeowners. But this podcast was prompted by an article looking not just at Australia, but at a range of other Western countries, in the journal Electoral Studies written by Josh Goddard. Josh, someone’s class and income level was once the most important factor in determining how they vote. Has that changed?
Josh: Thanks, Ben. There’s this historic trend identified in political science whereby somebody’s class position as defined by their occupation or their income used to be incredibly important for how they voted. So people in more affluent middle class positions tend to vote for parties of the centre-right and then those in more working class positions tend to support social democratic parties or parties of the radical left. But over time, there’s a significant literature which has kind of identified a weakening of that relationship.
But in my paper, I kind of propose that over this time period, there’s been another kind of societal change whereby somebody’s housing circumstances has become more important determinant of their level of economic security or affluence or you could, I guess you could call it their kind of class position. So I kind of set out to test in the paper whether as your labour market position, your income or occupation has become less important in explaining how you vote, whether that has kind of been replaced by housing circumstances. And I test, you know, across a series of 14 post-industrial societies, whether that’s been the case.
So I develop a series of theories suggesting that the effects should be different according to different types of housing markets. So I include countries from different types of housing market typologies. So I include a range of what I call English speaking countries. I include Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US. And then I include two German speaking countries which are very different housing markets in Germany and Austria and then I include other countries which I theorise will fit somewhere between these. So these are Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, France and Spain.
Ben: Shaun, your thoughts on this particular kind of research and what it shows? Was it a surprise to you?
Shaun: No, so this is something we’ve observed in Australia going back quite a few years now that housing and I would say the ownership of wealth or income producing assets has become an incredibly important cleavage in Australian politics. And we see this in other countries like the US as well. So whether or not you own your own home, ⁓ similarly, are you self-employed? Do you own shares or index funds outside of superannuation? All very, very strong predictors of vote intention.
In Australia, it’s those that own these assets, particularly housing, are much more likely to vote for parties of the right, like the Liberal-National coalition parties, and those that don’t own their own home or don’t own these other assets are generally much more likely to vote for the left. the Labor Party and also the Greens, particularly the Greens lately for renters.
Ben: It’s something I’ve noticed a bit in Australian results data is obviously we have the primary vote and we have the two party preferred vote that often Labor on a bunch of these metrics where there’s a lot of variety in how people vote – age, gender, asset status, housing, y’know, home ownership. On Labor, on the primary vote is actually very stable. know, Labor does about the same amongst young people as they do amongst old people.
But the difference there is who everyone else votes for. That the coalition does much better amongst older voters, amongst men. The Greens do much better amongst women, amongst young people, amongst renters. So when you look at a two-party preferred figure, where you’re taking into account that most of those Greens voters are going to preference Labor, Then it looks like Labor has quite a strong skew, but it doesn’t seem to exist within their primary vote.
Something I found interesting in your research, Josh, was that, you know, the first assumption would have been the left parties do better with renters, the right parties do better with homeowners. But it appears to be more complicated than that. There are certain kinds of parties, particularly once you get beyond a two party system, that do better or worse. Then there’s some where it’s not such a big effect. And so I noticed that, you know, maybe we notice a bit of an effect with labor here, but at least in Australia, it’s the Greens and radical left parties in other countries who are the party that does the best out of renters and the centre right that does the best out of homeowners. But what about those other parties?
Josh: Yes, so I propose in the paper that different housing market groups, kind of attitudinal positions will determine which party families they’re most likely to vote for.
So we know from the literature that there’s this effect that housing circumstances affect your kind of economic left right views, like your kind of traditional left right redistribution welfare tax views. So homeowners are more right wing and renters are more left wing on that. So we expect homeowners to support parties of the right on that basis and renters to support parties of the left. So maybe Labour parties, also radical left and green parties.
But I also propose that actually housing market circumstances affects a different type of attitude as well. And I label this pro anti-system attitudes in the paper. So you see that people in more insecure housing market positions, so renters especially, they tend to have higher levels of political disaffection and I label them kind of anti-system preferences.
So their kind of political behaviour is more likely to manifest itself in support for parties of the left that also mobilise political disaffection and anti-system positions. So therefore I kind of suggest that they’re more likely to support radical left parties and green parties in some circumstances that kind of exhibit this more populist political strategies, if you like, mobilise disaffection rather than traditional centre left parties, social democratic parties, labour parties, as kind of long serving or long term parties of government, they tend to attract more kind of pro system voters, voters with less disaffection in the political system, people who still have a level of trust in the political system.
Therefore, I propose that housing insecurity is more likely to manifest to these anti-system parties of the left than social democratic parties.
Shaun: I think Josh is 100 % right that the renting or not owning your own home can drive you towards anti-system parties, but it doesn’t always have to be parties of the left. So something we’ve seen in Australia very, very recently has been that age or generation has a mediating factor there. And so we ran a large sample survey last November, just as One Nation, which Josh, I don’t know how familiar you are with Australian politics, but it’s a sort of populist radical right party in Australia. So their vote share in polling started to take off the second half of last year as the centre-right coalition started to come apart.
And what we found was One Nation did very well amongst older voters that didn’t own their own home. So we had them with Gen X voters in particular that were renting. One Nation had 27% of the vote share of Gen X voters that were renting and 26 % of baby boomers that were renting. While amongst Gen Z that was 9%, with 29 % going off to the Greens. So there was this different effect where young renters here were going for the Greens. So in both cases, renters were sort of splitting off to away from the sort of traditional centrist government forming parties off to the smaller parties that were appealing to their specific interests or needs. But which way they went depended on other aspects of their characteristics. younger voters that were renting were going off to the Greens, older voters that were renting were splitting off to One Nation instead.
Ben: One of the things I was wondering was, is there effectively two forces cancelling each other out a little bit in your research, Josh, for those radical right parties that there are certain anti-system voters, like Shaun said, who maybe are attracted to them and are more likely to be renters, but there’s maybe another element there that doesn’t apply to the radical left that is like cancelling that out or something like that.
Josh: Yeah, I think that’s right. that so again, it’s talking about these two kind of, I suppose, dimensions of attitudes whereby on this kind pro anti system dimension, renters would seem to be attracted to radical right parties. But on the economic left, right dimension, less so.
And that’s really interesting what you say, Shaun, about One Nation. It’s interesting because the kind of social basis or the housing market profiles of radical right parties just differ quite a lot across countries. We have a similar pattern to Australia in Britain with support for Reform UK now and UKIP before that where they will mobilize kind of disaffected older voters more in continental Europe, they perform better amongst younger voters, not better than they do amongst older voters.
Age isn’t particularly important in predicting their support, but certainly better than they do amongst younger voters in Australia or Britain, for instance. Yeah, and I think, certainly, once you start to control for other factors, I found the effect of housing for most radical right parties to be explained away by other factors like education. Again, it’ll be interesting to see if that continues and the case of One Nation might be constructed as to that maybe.
Ben: Well, one thing I was wondering, like Shaun, you obviously have fresher data because you’re actually conducting fresh polls, but One Nation polled 6 % at last year’s election. Some polls now have them well into the 20s. Presumably the demographic makeup of those two groups are not the same, right? And so I could imagine that, you know, a far right party that’s polling 4 or 5 % probably looks quite different to one that’s polling 20.
Shaun: Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, so I mean, we’re seeing them strengthen across the board, which is interesting. But yeah, their profile is probably starting to look a little bit more like a classical conservative party in Australia, except for the housing profile, which is interesting. So the Coalition, to give you a sort of comparison, did well, as you might expect, amongst older voters, retired, the religious, particularly Protestants, but it generally did very, well with homeowners and very poorly with renters. One Nation’s currently doing fairly well with sort of a lot of the same groups as the Coalition did at the last election, except doing better with renters than homeowners. That’s sort of the biggest difference.
Ben: So Josh, can I go back to your research? Because one of the things I found interesting is, you know, not every country has the same political system, different electoral systems. Some of those countries you listed there have significantly more parties of significance in parliament than, say, Australia. And one thing I noted there was you talked about the category of radical left. And in Australia and New Zealand, I’m not sure if any other countries fit this category, the Green party filled that role of the radical left party.
But in some of these European countries in particular, there’s often another party that fills that niche, in which case I start to wonder where the Greens fit, say the German Greens or the Austrian Greens fit in terms of this demographic. What do you think’s going on there? And what’s the difference about say an Australian green party or a New Zealand Green Party compared to some of those mainland European ones?
Josh: Yeah, so I think it’s what you alluded to really that they they kind of occupied different positions in the party system. I mean, we’re seeing party system change in Britain as well. And this is the same process that’s happening whereby the Green Party is kind of looking more like a radical left party. And the social base of the party kind of reflects that. So when parties hold different positions in the party system, their social bases are changed to reflect that I suppose.
So in Germany for instance, or in other European countries in the context where you already have a radical left party, green parties tend to emerge and fill a different role in the party system, so they would tend to be less able to kind of mobilise this kind of anti-system left profile that radical left parties mobilise because they’re kind of almost already taken, And their coalitions will tend to be more defined by their kind of socially liberal views, and therefore higher levels of education and therefore kind of look different to a context where Green parties kind of fill the role of a radical left party like you say like in Australia, New Zealand, Britain increasingly.
Ben: Shaun, have you noticed, because I know it’s been going on for a while now that the Australian Greens have done quite well with renters. So the Greens vote at the last federal election stayed steady, but it actually went down in their inner city heartlands and actually went up a bit in some sort of multicultural middle suburban areas. And I did wonder a bit like, are they developing more of a demographic profile of a party that maybe resembles a little bit more one of those radical left parties in Europe, as opposed to a green party in Europe? Are you seeing any kind of shift in the demographic makeup of the Greens voter base?
Shaun: Yeah, they’re becoming increasingly, I would describe them as increasingly a party of young renters. So they’ve always done well in both of those demographics, but I’d say over the last couple of cycles, they’ve actually increased their support amongst young renters, but it’s gone backwards among some other demographics. So older professionals, for instance, or middle-aged professionals used to be pretty good demographic for the Greens. And now at least compared to younger renters, it’s actually probably not so much the case.
Josh: The housing market profiles in a way because higher sort of older professionals I guess as you can move into the more advantaged housing market positions maybe the Greens policies which I gather are in favour of increasing housing supply, rent controls and taxation of housing wealth, maybe that kind of puts voters off a little bit.
Shaun: Yeah, it’s almost like they became increasingly a party of material interests rather than environmental interests over the last couple of elections.
Ben: I do think a little bit of the story in seats like Melbourne where they went backwards a bit, not the main story, but I do think part of the story, is that there was a group of people who were ignoring their economic self-interest in voting for the Greens. And maybe some of those people couldn’t do that anymore. Like that was something that they couldn’t maintain anymore. And frankly, that makes a lot more sense to me than that, middle-class voters in Melbourne were voting against the Greens because of Israel or something like that.
It makes a lot more sense to me that they’re like, well, how long can I be a high wealth, high income person voting for a party that claims to have policies that aren’t good for me?
Shaun:
I think part of it depends on the focus those policies get and certainly over the last few years the Greens focused more on housing as an issue than they had in the past. They’ve always had those progressive housing policies, but they weren’t necessarily front and centre. I think over that last term of parliament in particular, housing did become a really core area of focus for the Greens. And I think that helped them in some areas, which is why you saw their support go up in some suburban electorates. It probably wasn’t the only thing going on there, but it was certainly part of the story. And yet dropped back in other areas, particularly some more affluent inner-city areas.
Ben: Cool. Shaun, you’ve also done research more broadly looking at asset ownership and wealth rather than necessarily just about whether you own the home you live in. Looking at the increasing role that’s taken. What else have you found in that area that’s maybe a little not quite the same thing as home ownership?
Shaun: Yeah, so I think what we could see is home ownership as part of a broader story rather than something that’s going on in isolation. one of the sort more consistent explanations, I think, for what we’ve seen, at least in Australia and similar in the US as well, actually, is that the ownership of assets, particularly those that either produce income or in the case of housing, provide you with housing services, which are sort of a proxy for income, imputed renters, economists call it. It provides you with a level of security that earned income doesn’t.
So Josh noting that income seems to become a weaker predictor of voting in recent decades in most representative democracies. And that’s something that obviously is a broader literature on is spot on. Part of that at least in Australia is because the conservative parties, the coalition here, have become increasingly the party of retirees and retirees tend to have lower incomes than people that are currently in the workforce. So if you just had, say people under the age of 65 voting, in most democracies, parties of the left would win quite easily.
So we’ve got these older voters who are often retired, who often have lower incomes voting in huge numbers for conservative parties. But what they also have is they own their own home, some of them own investment properties, they often own shares and businesses in some cases, in far greater numbers than younger voters. So their incomes are lower, but they have the security provided by these assets.
So what we see is the sheer number of asset classes someone owns, whether it’s housing, a business, a trust, shares and index funds, investment properties, is incredibly predictive of voting tension here in Australia and other democracies. And that’s likely because, at least in part, the security that provides means you don’t have to rely on things like the welfare state and industrial relations laws to provide you with security of income, to provide you with security if you get sick or lose your job, you have that additional buffer of either income derived from those assets or the proxy for income like imputed rents from your home.
If you are a high income professional, particularly in a large city, you might have a high income, but you don’t necessarily have the same level of security that those assets provide if you, for instance, rent your home and don’t own other assets to cushion you if you lose your job. You’re completely reliant on the income provided by that job. Things like unemployment, sickness, or other things that can impact on your ability to work would be devastating for your income and your quality of life. So even high income professionals who have moved to the left in recent decades are reliant on the welfare state to some degree, they are reliant on industrial relations laws in the way that someone that can rely on those assets to provide them with their livelihood just isn’t. And that to me is the most logical explanation or at least a big part of that story as to some of the shifts we’ve seen both in terms of occupations and income, but also assets over the last few decades.
Josh: I agree entirely. And I think kind of a broader point to make about is that the I guess I’d argue that kind of the broader literature has been a bit slower to catch up with that trend and that is quite a significant change in the kind of social structures of societies, I think, whereby it’s not adequate to conceptualise someone’s class position in terms of their income anymore and I think yeah I think that’s exactly right yeah.
Shaun: I think Josh’s sort of focus on different kinds of markets is really useful and important because obviously, if you’re in Australia, renting means something different to some European countries where security of tenure and other rights of the renters, make renting a very different experience. So this likely plays out quite differently.
I think that’s why you do see some different relationships between asset ownership and homeownership in particular and how people vote in these different countries because in Australia, renting just has a very different implication for New York in the US, but not necessarily other parts of the United States or some European countries where we just have very weak rights for renters in most states and although it’s changing a little bit but it still is pretty weak and so even if you’ve got a very high income you know the difference between renting and owning your own home is quite substantial here and you know impacts very huge swathes of your life in very different ways that wouldn’t necessarily be the case in some other countries and likely you know is one of the reasons why it’s just becoming one of the best predictors for vote intention we have.
Josh: Yeah, I also think I agree with that. I also don’t just look at home ownership versus renting in the paper, although that is a really important divide. I look at other divides as well amongst homeowners and amongst renters. Now, unfortunately, we don’t have data on house value for Australia, but I’ve looked at other countries and whereby you see that divides between high and lower value homeowners really, really matters.
So, centre-right parties are especially successful amongst higher value homeowners. And that speaks to Shaun’s point really about this being a kind of proxy for income now. if you’ve got a higher value house, you can use it more effectively as a substitute for social security or to provide for yourself. I also look at rental property ownership, again know Shaun’s research looked at this as well, of investment properties, and we do have data for that in Australia and New Zealand. And again landlords are a very very distinct electoral group as well, far more likely to vote for the Coalition in Australia or for centre-right parties generally than homeowners who don’t own an investment property.
Josh: And we also see there’s an effect between outright ownership. They’re more likely to vote for centre-right parties as opposed to people who have mortgages as well. But actually the effects of house of value are really striking and the strongest of those kind of internal divides there. So I think, you you can extend the story beyond the owner-rentor divide as well. And I think it’s to do with the mechanism Shaun identifies there about this kind of serving as a replacement for income.
Shaun: That makes a lot of sense, yeah.
Ben: So recently in Australian politics, we’ve seen a lot of seats that were those high income, high wealth electorates in urban Australia. They used to be safe Liberal Party seats. They’ve almost entirely been lost to the party, to independents or to Labor, sometimes to the Greens.
Shaun, do you think what we’ve been talking about today explains any of what’s been going on in those kinds of electorates?
Shaun: Yeah, so a lot of the electorates that the coalition won over the last two elections, well, really three elections, because this process arguably started in 2019 when they lost Warringah and has sped up over time. Part of, I think this is part of the story, I don’t think it’s the whole story, but certainly a lot of those inner and middle metropolitan electorates that have very high incomes, that when the Coalition lost them, I think some thought: we’re losing these rich pampered elites that are focusing on climate change and social issues. And we’re actually representing the battlers in the outer suburbs and bush. We’re the true party of the working class now.
They were making an error of attributing the characteristics of those electorates to the individuals in them. And the voters they were losing in those electorates, not everyone that lives in Warringah or Wentworth or Brisbane or Ryan or Kooyong in Melbourne is wealthy, right? Those electorates tend to have very high levels of renters and a lot of people that have huge mortgages for tiny little apartments. And so what we see here is yeah often, you know, young to middle-aged professionals, pretty good incomes, but either still renting well into their 40s or later, or maybe will never buy, or, you know, struggling to pay a mortgage on a relatively small apartment.
And that’s who they predominantly lost in those seats, not the older affluent voters. This is part of that story. I wouldn’t say it’s the whole story, but certainly, you know, I think what we’re seeing here is, yes this played out. The coalition necessarily didn’t see what was going on in some of the seats that, you know, tend to have dense populations, lots of apartments, lots of renters.
And younger people are predominantly living in those places and sorry, what I mean in those places, in those apartments and rentals in those seats. And so that certainly was part of the story that we saw play out over the last three federal elections.
Josh: So just on that, in terms of the changing nature of the Coalition, the Coalition coalition, like I can’t think of another word for that, is that as One Nation become more successful, and that significantly comes from the Coalition vote. Does the kind of social profile of the remaining Coalition vote change? Because we think that, as you were saying earlier, that One Nation seems to be attracting older renters, and they are more likely to have come from the older renters that did support the Coalition, even though that was a lower number.
They’ll disproportionately be going to One Nation, so the remaining Coalition vote could well be even more housing rich relative, if that makes sense. And that’s certainly a pattern that we’ve seen over the last couple of years in the UK, where the Conservative electorate has changed and a lot of it has gone off to Reform and the voters that have gone off have been more likely to be less housing rich than the ones who have stayed with the centre-right party. Now, I know that will play out slightly differently in Australia because of the electoral system being different and second preferences mattering, but it might be something to look out for, maybe over the next few years.
Ben: So that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thank you to my guests, Shaun.
Shaun: Thank you.
Ben: And thanks Josh.
Josh: Thanks, Ben.
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