ABSTRACT
During the decades since the 1980s, there has been a decisive change in European housing policies. In almost all countries there has been a shift from a housing policy regime where the state plays an extensive role in the production and consumption of housing, to a system where market mechanisms play a more central role. The uniformity of the development across many countries raises a question of whether there is some more general regularity in this development, perhaps even a law of development of housing policies applicable to all societies, including the East Asian ones. It is, however, quite questionable whether general laws valid in all socio-historical contexts can be detected in social and political development (Elster, 1993). If, indeed, no general laws of development exist in societies, we should generalize in more modest ways, as generalize we must if we are to be social researchers. One form of such generalizations is the creation of models that attempt to capture how a given process typically happens. Such models are often developed inductively, by looking empirically at how processes have happened in various cases.
