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An important question that has caused much academic debate is how to best organise the welfare state system to combat poverty and social exclusion. Much such research is focused on how to combat income poverty through core areas in the welfare state. This dissertation widens the perspective to include housing as a part of the welfare state and it represents an attempt to study poverty outcomes beyond income measures. In doing this, the dissertation uses power resource theory to understand welfare state change and the design of institutions in terms of housing tenures, and shows how this design might affect individual outcomes. Thus, the overall aim of this dissertation is to gain knowledge of the principles that underpin the design and organisation of the housing market in terms of tenure types and to understand the ways in which this design might affect the well-being of individuals and the society as a whole. The dissertation consists of an introductory essay and four papers. The introductory essay presents my theoretical approach and methodology. It also summarises the papers and discusses my main findings. Paper I analyses the extent to which the organisation of the rental sector may explain cross-national differences in the prevalence of housing deprivation. Using a multilevel framework on survey data covering 26 European countries, I find that a large and integrated rental sector significantly reduces the prevalence of housing deprivation across EU countries. The organisation of the rental sector appears to be crucial when it comes to reducing poverty and social exclusion in terms of housing insufficiencies. Paper II continues the quest to find explanations of the variations in the prevalence of housing deprivation in Europe. Our results develop the findings of Paper I. We find that a high proportion of outright owners is positively associated with housing deprivation. This is suggested to reflect the historical and political processes that affect the housing markets in eastern and southern European housing regimes. Paper III investigates a puzzle regarding the relationship between the extent of home-ownership and unemployment. At the macro level, more home-owners indicate higher unemployment rates, while home-owners in general are less unemployed. What can explain this? In this paper, we show that regions with high home-ownership also tend to be regions with small labour markets, which affects the efficiency of matching on the labour market. Paper IV turns to the process of residualisation, a process which can be described as when the public or social rental sectors become dominated by low-income households. For Sweden, this process is of key interest since the public housing sector aims to be universal and is not directed towards any specific income group. The results indicate a clear trend towards increasing residualisation. The trend is most pronounced in sparsely populated municipalities, while the public rental sector is quite mixed in larger cities and municipalities near larger cities. This dissertation offers a contribution to the field of housing by showing that power resource theory may be used to understand institutional design in terms of tenure types, and that this design also affects individual outcomes. Moreover, power resource theory is presented as a viable theory to understand geographical variation in institutional design across and within countries. ; At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.

Using the data from the 'European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions' (EU-SILC), this book reflects the results of almost 5 years of research involving data producers and data users. It aims to improve our understanding of substantive challenges facing 'Social Europe' and to contribute to the development of methods that provide new insights into the determinants and dynamics of income and living conditions. Through in-depth analyses, it enhances our knowledge of a wide range of topics: inequalities, role of social transfers, mortality risk due to poverty and social exclusion, intra-household variation in deprivation, between-country differences in housing conditions, unmet medical need, child deprivation, migrants' living conditions, as well as the dynamics of in-work monetary poverty and deprivation and of multidimensional poverty. The book also puts forward robust policy-relevant indicators in these fields, including longitudinal indicators. This volume is intended both for policy-makers and statisticians and for all those concerned about the impact of economic and social policies on people's lives and the ways in which the social dimension of Europe and its monitoring can be reinforced.

Housing benefits differ substantially across countries. In this paper, we apply power resource theory, developed primarily in relation to the emergence and subsequent expansion of social citizenship, to housing policy. The purpose is to analyse the political determinants of housing benefits, and particularly the role of left parties and the partisan mobilization of labour. The empirical analyses are based on new housing benefit data for 31 affluent democracies from the period 2001-2018. The results of a series of fixed effects pooled time-series regressions show that the strength of left government is positively associated with the size of housing benefits. However, the positive influence of left cabinets is conditional on the relative size of rental housing and the fractionalization of the party system. Our findings highlight the need to combine actor-oriented explanations of the welfare state with theories about the corporatist power structures of society.