Metodología o desarrollo 106

The academic field of housing studies is dominated by a policy perspective, that is, an ambition to make relevant and useful contributions to political, administrative and professional decision making.

More seldom researchers in the field employ a politics perspective, analysing the political institutions of relevance to housing provision and the games and processes of decision-making per se (Bengtsson, 2014).

Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic and religious institutions. It consists of social relations involving authority or power and refers to the regulation of a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply policy. The central concepts of political science, namely power, democracy, citizenship, social justice and so on are without doubt of relevance to housing and housing issues are still generally considered to be of political interest. In contrast to housing policy, housing politics focuses on the process rather than the outcome, on action, interaction and social relations rather than on structure, and on the formulation and application of policy rather than on its substantial contents (Bengtsson, 2007).

The main output of a political system is policies, and policies are government statements of what it intends to do or not to do, including laws, regulations, decisions and orders. Public policy, in turn, is a more specific term that refers to a long series of actions carried out to solve societal problems. The political perspective involves scrutinising the role of the executive and legislative branches of government, and how policies are made and what factors determine their shapes (Knill & Tosun, 2000). Governments tend to use the typology developed by Lowi (1964) in Table 4.2 when developing policies.

Table 4.2: Policy typology element of the costs and benefits of policies as they have implications for the acceptance or rejection of a policy and the type of politics involved. Wilson distinguishes between policies on the basis of whether the costs and benefits are either widely distributed or narrowly concentrated.

Table 4.3: Policy cost benefit matrix

Costs

Benefits

Concentrated Diffused

Concentrated (i) Interest group politics (ii) Entrepreneurial politics

Diffused (iii) Client politics (iv) Majoritarian politics

Source: Knill and Tosun, 2000

The above can be explained as follows: (i) when both costs and benefits of a certain policy are concentrated a government may be confronted with opposition of rivalling interest groups signalling interest group politics; (ii) where costs are concentrated and benefits diffused, a government may encounter opposition from dominant interest groups, signalling entrepreneurial politics; (iii) where costs are diffused and benefits are concentrated, a government may be confronted with a relevant interest group that is favourable to its reform endeavour, indicating a clientelistic politics; and (iv) where both costs and benefits are diffused, a government may encounter non or only minor opposition, signalling majoritarian politics (Knill & Tosun, 2012).

Housing is usually considered to be one of the major components of social policy, along with health, education, social security and personal social services, but housing is different from these other pillars of a welfare state, in that in housing there is no attempt by the state to meet housing needs of all people through a comprehensive housing service for all people in the same way that government can provide a national health service for everyone (Malpass & Murie, 1982). Public housing policies are usually informed by government‘s effort to (i) eliminate market failures and ensure that the housing market functions more efficiently and (ii) distribute housing consumption to ensure affordable

housing for all groups of society (Lux, 2003). The dual role of public housing policies is therefore as both understanding paternalist and rational economist in that policies are directed at ensuring the economic efficiency of the housing market, on the one hand, and also ensuring the social effectiveness (equity) in the distribution of housing services, on the other.

In a representative democracy, delegates are selected to act on behalf of their constituents. In this form of democracy, elected officials are encouraged and expected to consider the best interests of all their citizens and the purpose of the democratic process (i.e., voting) is to ensure that the desires of the majority are realised in policymaking (Kellison, 2013). While the poor take advantage of their right to vote to enhance their wealth through the redistribution of wealth from the wealthy people to the poor, rational politicians are more often than not persuaded by their selfish ambitions of maximising the number of potential voters for themselves in the next election when they decide on housing development programmes (Lux, 2003). Similarly, Schwartz and Clements (1999) suggest that the reason behind using subsidies as a policy tool may be political, having to do with logrolling or vote trading or for economic reasons. Similarly, Dick Morris, the US Democrats political strategist urged housing officials to take advantage of the quartet of housing ideas that present themselves to them, as political opportunities (Lux, 2003). He urged them to target ‗the smaller cities in middle America particularly those in swing states, for them to have the ear of the national candidates in the coming elections‘. This demonstrates the fact that some policy decisions about housing are politically motivated.

Housing politicisation can be a distortion of housing struggles or political struggles. This occurs when (i) politicians make use of the housing issue to gain popularity and (ii) when housing consumers bring their housing issues to political debate for them to gain political support (Wong, 1999). Similarly, Fung (2004) suggests that the politicisation of housing can make the housing issue lose its original meaning due to ideological and partisan conflicts. It is therefore logically difficult to expect honest solutions for housing from political debates because of politicians‘ tendency to protect their political interests (Wong, 1999). Political ideologies have an influence on the housing policies and there outcomes. Chelcea (2012) posited that due to differing political ideologies and political interests between socialist countries and Western capitalist countries, whereas housing nationalisation in socialist states has created a special urban process whose main dimensions were (i) a concentration of the population by raising the occupancy rate; (ii) residential proximity of families who formerly populated different geographic areas of the city; and (iii) shrinkage of residential space due to its conversion into office space for state bureaucracies, the urban processes that developed in Western capitalist cities after the late 1940s transformed them from dense and centralised agglomerations into scattered, decentralised metropolitan areas due to the Western ideologies that are different from those

of the socialist states. The formulation of housing policy goals and their translation into action are thus influenced by particular ideological stances adopted by politician (Malpass & Means, 1993).

Politicising housing yields unintended outcomes. Van de Linde (1983) suggests that factors that are conducive to informal settlements that are mushrooming in developing nations such as South Africa, are that (i) the political climate favours invasion of land with the protection of politicians, for politicians to garner support during elections, and (ii) illegal brokers under the protection of politicians and/or influential people in government sell plots of government land to individuals with protection against eviction. Similarly, Lux (2003) argues that it is in the interest of politicians for property inequality to continue to exist, that there is fear amongst some politicians of the consequences of a complete property equality.

Decisions taken by politicians have a bearing on the choices or alternatives that will be available for the state in the future (path dependence). Path dependence is the process in which choices made in the past systematically constrain the choices open in the future (Myles & Pierson 2001). It is a concept that suggests that what has happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of a sequence of events occurring at a later stage (Sewell 1996). According to Lux (2009), path dependence refers to the tendency for solutions to problems becoming locked in; sometimes through institutional setting and ideology and becoming difficult to change, and any revolutionary change becomes hardly possible. The typical case of path dependence in a political perspective is where actors more or less deliberately design institutions at point A, institutions that at a later point B serve as restraints to political decision-making, and thus make some policy alternatives impossible or implausible (Yong-Chang, 2014). Similarly, Bengtsson (2007) suggests that the reason why the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland) have continued for at least 60 years to have huge differences between their housing development models even though they share a number of similarities in other respects, is an indication of historical decisions that cannot be withdrawn. Bengtsson further suggests that considering the regular collaboration and exchange of ideas that take place on between Nordic politicians and officials, these countries‘ housing policies and programmes would ordinarily have shown some signs of convergence, if it were not for the past decisions that are preventing them to learn from one another.