1 Political Science, Politics, and Housing Studies

It has often been claimed that the academic field of housing studies is dominated by a policy perspective, i.e. 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. This paper takes a politics perspective and reviews research on housing that focuses political institutions (state and non-state) and processes of interaction between political elite actors as well as between elite actors and citizens in general. It also discusses applications in housing studies of some normative political concepts like democracy, citizenship and social justice. The argument of the paper is related to three societal levels: national housing systems, local urban governance, and estate management and resident participation with a main emphasis on the national level. The review encompasses work by political scientists as well as by researchers from other disciplines. The outline is as follows: In the next section the modest position of political science in the field of housing studies is verified, and some possible explanations to this deficit ar