Mapping Ideologies
A Comparative Study of Political Responses to the Housing Crisis in Europe
J. Treffers (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
J.S.C.M. Hoekstra – Mentor (TU Delft - Urban Development Management)
P.J. Boelhouwer – Mentor (TU Delft - Housing Systems)
K.P.M. Aalbers – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Environmental Technology and Design)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
This thesis investigates how political ideologies structure housing policy proposals across five European regions: the Netherlands, Flanders, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Spain. Through a qualitative content analysis of 19 national-level election programmes, the study codes each housing proposal using ten indicators grouped into four tiers (core responsibility mix, regime logics, policy levers, and outcome patterns). These indicators are then mapped onto welfare-regime logics — social-democratic, corporatist, liberal, and Mediterranean — and visualised in a welfare triangle that locates parties by how they assign housing responsibility to the state, market, and family. The analysis compares results both across ideological party families (social democratic, Christian democratic, liberal, populist) and within them, to assess convergence, divergence, and the influence of national context.
The findings show that party ideology remains a meaningful organising force in housing: social-democratic parties are highly coherent and consistently state-led; Christian-democratic parties cluster around a corporatist, partnership-based logic; liberal parties share a deregulatory focus but diverge sharply in their wider toolkits; and populist parties are thematically consistent in nativist allocation and family protection but instrumentally eclectic. National context shapes these patterns without fully determining them, with a visible familial pull in Spanish cases. The study contributes a replicable framework for reading housing proposals as ideological repertoires rather than technical measures, and shows that housing policy is used not only to address affordability and supply, but to define who is protected, on what terms, and by whom.