Varieties of Central European Housing Tenure Regimes: The Long Life of a North-South Cleavage Line

Zespół Socjologii Polityki, Gospodarki i Edukacji oraz Max Planck Partner Group for the Sociology of Economic Life zapraszają na wykład

“Varieties of Central European Housing Tenure Regimes: The Long Life of a North-South Cleavage Line”

 Bence Kováts (European University Institute) i Sebastian Kohl (Freie Universität Berlin)

      Dyskusja: Mikołaj Lewicki (Instytut Socjologii UW), Adam Czerniak (SGH)

15 czerwca 9:15-11:00, sala 154, Pałac Staszica

Abstrakt:  Central and Eastern Europe is often perceived in the political science literature as a region fundamentally shaped by its common state-socialist past. Although inter-country differences among welfare states in the region have received attention, housing as “the wobbly pillar of the welfare state” remains a field where such differences remain undertheorized and often explained solely by different policy choices made in the past few decades. Based on data encompassing developments in housing tenure and housing policy in the past 140 years in seven countries, we trace the long history of a division between the North (Germany, Poland and Czechia) and the South (Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) in terms of their support for and the share of collectively (cooperative and non-profit rental) and privately owned housing. Differences in the countries’ tenure structures and housing policies are rooted in policy choices made before state socialism was introduced in the region. Taking a path dependence perspective, the paper argues that although agency of decision-makers, changes in countries’ positions in the world economy, global economic cycles and changes of sources of legitimacy effectuated the significant transformation of the tenure structure in the region, Northern and Southern countries retained their difference.

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