EU cultural policy and audience perspectives: how cultural value orientations are related to media usage and country context

ABSTRACT

This article studies how people across Europe think about cultural value, including cultural heritage, and how this is related to their media usage. Drawing on data from the Eurobarometer in October 2017, which were designed with EU cultural policy goals in mind, we examine which cultural value orientations are most prevalent among citizens in European Union countries, and how these are related to their use of legacy news media and online media, their trust in professional journalists and social networks, and the media system their country belongs to. Our findings show three distinct types of cultural value orientation among Europeans: valuing cultural heritage, valuing cultural exchange, and skepticism towards European culture. These orientations map onto two out of three pillars of EU policy goals. While individual media usage and trust are important predictors of these orientations, we find limited effects of media systems, including market shares of public broadcasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural value orientations
• European cultural policy
• Europe
• media systems
• media usage
• trust

Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank Semi Purhonen and Erik Hitters for their feedback on a previous version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in GESIS Eurobarometer Data Service at https://www.gesis.org/eurobarometer-data-service/search-data-access/data-access, reference number ZA6925.

Notes

1. www.ec.europa.eu/culture/policy/strategic-framework_en.

2. From here on, we use ‘Europeans’ when we refer to EU citizens.

3. https://ec.europa.eu/culture/policy/strategic-framework_en#targetText=The%202,019%2D22%20Work%20Plan,creative%20professionals%20and%20European%20content.

4. But note that Eurobarometer has separate country codes for Germany East, and Northern Ireland.

5. Additional analyses in which these answers were treated as ‘neutral’ produced very similar outcomes.

6. Hanitzsch, Van Dalen and Steindl (2018, 19) in fact point to the trust-nexus of politics and the news media, i.e. ‘the idea that trust in the news media is tied to the way publics look at political institutions’.

7. We also conducted analyses in which countries were classified in four types of media systems, following Hallin and Mancini (2004) and later developments: liberal, democratic corporatist, polarized pluralist, and post-communist (and an additional fifth category of the Nordic model). However, analyses in which we included those types led to worst fitting statistical models.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marc Verboord

Marc Verboord, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research is situated at the crossroads of cultural sociology, communication science, and media studies, and addresses questions on cultural consumption, cultural globalization, and the impact of new media on cultural evaluation. He is Co-Editor of Poetics. Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, Media and the Arts. His work has been published in international journals such as American Sociological Review, New Media & Society, European Sociological Review, European Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, Cultural Sociology, and Popular Music & Society.

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen

Nete Nørgaard Kristensen, PhD, is Professor of Media Studies at Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen, where she also serves as head of Section of Media Studies. She specializes in research about media and popular culture, especially cultural journalism and cultural criticism across platforms; and political communication, including media, war and conflict. Her work has appeared in international journals such as Celebrity Studies; Communication, Culture & Critique; Digital Journalism; Journalism - Theory, Practice, Criticism; Journalism Practice; Journalism Studies; Media, War and Conflict; Nordic Journal of Media Studies; Nordicom Review; Sociology Compass; Television & New Media. She has extensive research management experience as PI for several research projects and networks.