Norms in the politics of housing for minorities: Evidence from a French, a German and a US metropolitan area

Throughout Western societies, policy-makers who address the problems of disadvantaged ethnic and immigrant minorities confront norms that prescribe equal or preferential treatment for these groups. Variations in these norms make significant differences in policy-making. Based on evidence from housing and planning policies and a standardized survey of local elites in comparable German, French and US metropolitan areas, this article analyses how these norms altered logics of policy-making. Normative differences help to explain why policies to house minorities proved more successful in the German setting than in the French. Contrasts in central-local relations, in local government, in political parties and in the social and economic background of policy-making fail to account for the difference that these norms make. In the American setting normative ambiguities combined with institutional, social and spatial differences to render parallel norms comparatively ineffective.