Housing Regime Typologies and Their Discontents: A Systematic Literature Review

Housing regime typologies represent a key conceptual construct in the comparative housing research literature, whose classificatory and explanatory capacity is still the subject of lively debate. The variety of methods and results amassed in the field, alternatively dismissing or supporting their usefulness, makes it difficult to discern the classificatory and explanatory power of various housing regime approaches. To this aim, this study offers a systematic literature review of housing regime theorization and its applications. In doing so, we make a case for the use of systematic literature reviews in housing studies, still rare in the field. We thus map, compare and evaluate the use of such typologies by looking at how they were used in clustering national housing systems, and in empirical research testing the regime-related hypotheses. Our results point to the enduring relevance of housing regime theory in comparative housing research, although from a historically grounded perspective.