Inaction, individual action and collective action as responses to housing dissatisfaction: a comparative study of Budapest and Moscow

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Abstract
Responses to dissatisfaction can take the form of inaction, individual action or collective action (e.g. protest). The aim of the present article is threefold: to put forward a model which treats these responses as a linked set of objects of analysis (rather than marginalizing the former two as in the literature on social movements), to emphasize the importance of social structure and the institutional context for all three responses (contrary to Hirschman's ‘exit, voice and loyalty’ model) and to throw light on responses to housing dissatisfaction in two former state socialist capital cities, Budapest and Moscow. It is shown that: (a) inaction in the housing sphere is concentrated among those in the weakest social structural position and that attempts to represent this as due to their ‘loyalty’ are quite mistaken; (b) that individual action is the dominant response to housing dissatisfaction (an effect of issue domain) and is most common among those in middling or strong social positions; and (c) that although respondents did not consider collective action as a way of dealing with their housing dissatisfaction, such action does exist especially in Moscow where it was due to strong motivation in the face of an unfavourable political and resource context.