Social housing policy in a conservative welfare state: Austria as an example

Summary. Taking Austria as an example, the article sets out to explore the relationship between a particular type of welfare regime and the kind of social housing policy developed within such an environment. Austria has repeatedly and consistently been classi ed as the ideal type of a conservative and familialistic welfare regime and as a paradigm case of corporatism. Particular attributes of such a regime (fragmentation, corporatism, familialism, immobilism) do have their repercussions within Austrian housing and may be detected within Austrian housing policy. Worlds of Welfare and Worlds of Housing Amongst the contemporary literature on pub-lic policy, Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s writings on The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990; see also 1996, 1999) stand out as some of the most widely debated products of cross-national research. There is hardly any publication on state activity today whic