The tenure gap in electoral participation: instrumental motivation or selection bias? Comparing homeowners and tenants across four housing regimes

Abstract

Integrating housing tenure in Instrumental Motivation Theory predicts a tenure gap in electoral participation, as homeowners would be more motivated to vote compared with tenants. The empirical question is whether this effect is causal or rather due to selection into different housing tenures. This question is tackled using coarsened exact matching (CEM) on data for 19 countries, allowing us to better control for endogeneity. Even then, homeowners are found to vote more often than tenants. This association is stronger in countries characterized by a strong pro-homeownership ideology and/or where the financialization of housing markets turned houses into assets.