Burdens and gains. The association between house rent increases and voting in the city of Madrid

Existing research indicates that the electoral effects of changing house rents depend on political parties’ left-right positioning and adherence to populist ideas. This paper explores the association between house rent increases and voting in Madrid by exploiting the availability of fine-grained data at the census tract-level, and the existence of an electoral arena where parties compete from different positions on crucial dimensions such as populism and the intervention of the state in the economy. In particular, we focus our analysis on non-populist parties of the mainstream left (PSOE) and right (Ciudadanos and PP), a radical right party with a strong neoliberal discourse and inconsistent populist appeals (VOX), and a radical left party that has traditionally adopted a populist discourse (Unidas Podemos). Our main results indicate that house rent increases benefit right-wing parties in neighbourhoods with high ownership rates (economic gain), thus offering an alternative context-dependent mechanism to explain the success of (liberal) radical right parties when house rents rise. They also suggest that house rent increases associate with voting for left-wing parties, especially if they adhere to populist ideas, in neighbourhoods with lower levels of homeownership (economic burden).