WEALTHPOL 1 developed, explored and analysed cross-national and sub-national data on individual and national wealth. Three datasets were created and are publicly available. First, a ‘one stop shop’ database of every question pertaining to wealth across 30 national household panel datasets. Second, local and regional data on house prices for twenty-eight countries. Third, a cross-national time-series data at the country level of wealth inequality from 1800.
The data developed in WEALTHPOL 1 has been used in a broad series of published and working papers. The project article ‘Housing and Populism’ co-authored by PI Ben Ansell with David Adler (Oxford), was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal West European Politics. A second published paper developing the connection between house prices and populist support was co-authored by WEALTHPOL team members Ben Ansell and Jacob Nyrup. The paper was published in 2022 in the Journal of Politics, one of the ‘big three’ journals in political science, and received coverage in the Danish newspaper Zetland.
We also developed a research agenda on the politics of housing affordability. In a paper co-authored by WEALTHPOL members Ben Ansell and Asli Cansunar, published in the leading social policy journal Journal of European Social Policy, we show low levels of local housing affordability lead to a polarization in political attitudes between renters and owners.
Housing also affected citizens’ behaviour during the COVID pandemic. In an article published in West European Politics by team members Ben Ansell, Asli Cansunar, and Mads Elkjær, we find areas in the UK, Sweden, and Denmark with high house prices had more social distancing during the pandemic, as people with larger, more expensive houses found ‘work from home’ easier.
A final published article by WEALTHPOL team member Mads Elkjær connected wealth and income inequality to political responsiveness in Europe and was published in the prestigious Perspectives on Politics. The paper shows politicians generally respond more to wealthier voters but that this effect is highly conditional on model specification.
With Jane Gingrich (Oxford), PI Ben Ansell wrote a report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies Deaton Review of Inequality, exploring political inequality in Britain since 1964, particularly the role of homeownership and house prices.
PI Ben Ansell also published a peer-invited (not peer-reviewed) paper on housing: a literature overview article on ‘The Politics of Housing’ published by the prestigious Annual Review of Political Science.
WEALTHPOL 1 remains fruitful, with a series of working papers posted at the University of Oxford’s ORA archive at
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/(opens in new window).
WEALTHPOL 2 looked at wealth policies and political rhetoric. Team members Laure Bokobza and Elkjær developed a novel cross-national dataset of wealth tax policies. The dataset is available on the project’s website and will be employed in a number of future projects.
In terms of political rhetoric, Ansell, Bokobza and Nyrup have a working paper available at ORA that analyses the full corpus of British parliamentary speeches and uses unsupervised machine learning techniques to parse the structure of speech over housing and wealth.
WEALTHPOL 3 was also completed in 2021 and 2022. This project involved online lab experiments that culminated in a paper co-authored by the WEALTHPOL team, available on ORA and presented at Oxford. We show that participants respond differently to economic benefits they receive as wealth versus earnings and that information about the distribution of resources across participants has different impacts on income versus wealth taxation.
WEALTHPOL 3 also involved running three surveys in the UK (one in 2021, two in 2022), each including experimental components. Work from these papers has been presented at international conferences in Czechia and Canada, as well as at Harvard, and four working papers using this data are available at ORA. They are in various stages of submission to journals. We ran a survey including information treatments and conjoint elements across seven European countries in 2022. An early working paper analysing this data is posted at ORA.
