Explaining Housing Policy Change through Discursive Institutionalism

Explaining how and why housing policies change is an ongoing theoretical challenge for housing scholars. A key approach is the ‘housing regimes’ framework (Kemeny 2006), drawing from Esping-Andersen’s work on the role of labour/capital struggles in shaping welfare states. However, this framework has been criticised (Stephens 2020; Clapham 2020) for inadequately explaining housing system changes, including neoliberal shifts and financialization. In response, scholars have turned to political science and sociology theories on policy change, such as historical institutionalism (Ruonavaara 2020) and discursive theories focusing on interactions between policy actors (Clapham 2018). This article builds on Clapham’s discursive turn in housing studies by incorporating concepts from ‘discursive institutionalism’ (DI) (Schmidt 2008). DI explains policy change by examining the interplay of ideas, interactions, and power dynamics in a given policy field. DI provides a methodological framework for understanding how policy actors develop and use ideas to shape policies, while considering the influence of the institutional context and power relations. The aim of the article is to highlight the utility of DI as a framework for examining housing policy change. As a vehicle for doing so, an analysis of social housing policy change in New Zealand employing DI is provided for empirical reference. The article builds on Clapham’s (2018) focus on discourse in housing studies, adding DI to the repertoire of conceptual frameworks available to researchers interested in the causal role of ideas and discourse in policy change processes.