Antecedents and Consequences of Housing Status across Housing Regimes

Abstract

My dissertation investigates the consequences of housing status for political stability and social cohesion across different housing regimes in European countries and the antecedents of housing status in South Korea. Here, housing status refers to a form of social stratification generated by unequal access to housing resources, and housing regimes refer to a combination of the institutions, laws, policies, and norms through which a society provides and allocates housing. Few empirical studies analyze how variation in housing regimes at the macro-level moderates experiences and consequences of housing inequality at the micro-level. My dissertation addresses this gap as follows. The first article empirically constructs housing regimes across European countries and examines the homeownership effect on political stability, operationalized as political trust, in these different housing regimes. This article finds three distinct housing regimes: the liberal, the corporatist, and the familial regimes. This article finds support that homeownership does give rise to political trust, yet the homeownership effect is significant only in the liberal and the corporatist regimes, not in the familial regime. This finding implies that the homeownership effect may be context-dependent. The second article investigates the link between housing status and social cohesion, operationalized as generalized trust, in Austria and Germany. This article demonstrates a significant positive association between housing status and generalized trust both in cross-sectional and longitudinal models. Additionally, this article helps uncover causal mechanisms of the association through a sense of autonomy and residential satisfaction. Finally, the third article investigates antecedents of housing tenure of newlyweds in South Korea, in the context of the unusual rental system of jeonse (a rental tenure under which tenants pay a large sum of money as a deposit instead of monthly rent, and they receive the money back at the end of the contract). This article illustrates the importance of attending to historical and institutional contexts in analyses of housing stratification. The dissertation contributes to sociology and housing studies in several ways. First, this dissertation constructs the concept of housing status having multiple dimensions, including tenure, property rights, housing quantity, quality, and housing environment. Second, this study delineates causal mechanisms that mediate housing status effects, mainly psychological factors. Third, this study demonstrates the importance of considering norms and institutions in the housing regime, which in turn moderate housing status effects. Finally, this study extends the geographic scope of the housing stratification literature, which is largely focused on the United States and Western Europe, by incorporating post-Soviet countries and an East Asian country.