Bringing new ideas to housing research

This paper examines how empathy is constructed, mobilised, and contested in political discourse on housing, using Poland as a strategic case to explore broader mechanisms of affective governance. Drawing on a critical realist framework, Critical Discourse Analysis, and insights from social empathy theory, affect studies, and critical housing research, the paper analyses how political actors use empathy to legitimise policies, assign moral value, and frame housing tenure in terms of responsibility or failure. The study draws on a cross-party housing debate held before Poland’s 2023 parliamentary elections, supplemented by media statements from 2023–2025. It identifies four recurring patterns: (1) withholding empathy from those who deviate from the ownership norm, (2) conditional distribution of empathy, (3) selective recognition of structural barriers, and (4) empathy as a site of ideological struggle. These patterns reflect broader ideological logics and institutional constraints. The paper contributes to housing studies by offering an affect-sensitive framework for understanding how emotional discourse shapes responses to housing inequality.

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the What’s the Problem Represented to Be approach (WPR), a tool of policy analysis developed by the Australian political scientist Carol Bacchi to examine the discursive representations of council tenants’ participation in connection with the inclusion of council housing tenants from the Jazdów Estate in the decision-making process relating to local housing policy in Warsaw. The article identifies two discursive representations of council tenants’ participation: (1) council tenants as an expected passive audience in top-down policymaking and (2) the limited acceptance of the agency of council tenants in policymaking. It was found that in Warsaw - or at least in the case of Jazdów - the political and discursive interpretation of tenants’ participation is primarily associated with the act of informing and less often with public consultation or the co-production of housing policy.