Testing the ownership society: Ownership and voting in Britain

Prior work on political effects of personal asset ownership in the United Kingdom has found a causal link between home and share ownership and conservative political preferences and voting. These estimates appear to confirm the “ownership society” thesis tying privatization and asset ownership to improved prospects for conservative parties. This paper proposes a new identification strategy for testing this causal connection that improves on earlier research designs. I exploit temporal variability in panel data to better specify the definition of home ownership and control for unobserved confounders associated with ownership. Under this design, home ownership is found to have no or very weak effects on voting in the 1997 and 2001 General Elections. Where weakly significant results are found, they suggest a mixed effect on partisan outcomes at the ballot box. Finally, while extending this strategy to financial assets does support the “ownership society” hypothesis, doing so illuminates a very different set of identification problems, which point to underlying flaws in the “ownership society” argument itself.

► Asset ownership may affect voting decisions in democracies.
► Such effects are presumed to favor conservative parties.
► We find weak-to-no effects for home ownership in 1990s Britain.
► We also find significant effects for stock ownership, favoring Conservatives.