Legislating landlords: Private interests, issue emphasis, and policy positions

Abstract

Do private interests predict politicians' rhetoric? Focusing on housing policy, we compare issue emphasis and positions of landlord politicians and politicians who do not own multiple properties. Ireland provides a unique opportunity to study legislating landlords' behavior as housing has become one of the most important political issues. We construct a novel dataset of politicians' homeownership status between 2013 and 2022, a period characterized by rising rent and property prices. We fine‐tune a transformer‐based machine learning model and apply text scaling and sentiment analysis to identify issue salience and positions on housing in over 870,000 tweets and parliamentary questions. Contrary to our expectations, landlord politicians do not avoid the topic of housing, nor do they take different positions. We also find that government status does not influence this relationship. The results imply that private financial interests do not influence rhetoric on housing policy.