European models of cultural policy: towards European convergence in public spending and cultural participation?

ABSTRACT

Cultural policies were invented in post-war Europe with three basic aims: to safeguard cultural heritage; to encourage creation; to bring The Arts closer to citizens. Thus, led by Scandinavia and countries such as France and Great Britain, these policies spread and shaped different models, each of which responded to different cultural, historical and political traditions. A process of European cultural convergence is currently under way within the framework of the European Union. Evidence for this convergence is to be found in Compendium, Eurostat and Eurobarometer data. However, long-lasting structural and institutional factors explain why notable differences in cultural spending and the make-up of cultural consumption persist, hence the need to rethink the notion of European cultural policy models.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural policy
• cultural participation
• Welfare State models
• European convergence
• Europeanisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Research on cultural policy has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last few decades. The seminal work was done in the 1970s and 1980s by French sociologists Bourdieu, Darbel, and Schnapper (2003), Moulin (1992) and Urfalino (1996), with later contributions by Schuster (1987) and DiMaggio (1991) in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, research – especially in English-speaking countries – has combined the perspectives of Sociology, Cultural Studies, and more recently, Culture Economics and Urban Studies (Mulcahy 2017; Gray 2010).

2. This paper does not analyse all the goals of cultural policy and its institutional configuration in European countries. That is because one cannot use a comparative methodology for all European countries in a paper of this nature. Nevertheless, we can say that a comparative study of overall spending correlates with how developed a cultural policy is and its degree of consolidation in the public management field – as other authors have observed (Moulin 1997; Menger 2011). One should also note that the highest levels of cultural spending in relation to the overall public budget and, in particular, to GDP, are found in countries with the greatest democratising goals. Such spending is lowest in Greece and other Southern European countries (Arostegui, Arturo, and Rius-Ulldemolins 2018) and highest in Nordic countries which, despite internal contradictions, are most ambitious when it comes to democratising cultural consumption and active involvement (Mangset 2018).

3. Typologies of European States have also been drawn up in other fields with regard to public policies. For example, Visser (Visser 2009) defined three models in a study commissioned by the European Union: The Liberal Pluralist Model (Great Britain, Ireland, Cyprus, and Malta); The Organised Corporatist Model (Denmark, Finland, Sweden); The Social Partnership Model (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Slovenia), The State-Centric Model (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain); ‘Transition States’ (Bulgaria, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Rumania, Slovakia). These categories largely coincide with those we have used in this study.

4. As our starting point for the concept of ‘Europeanisation’, we can take the broad definition provided by Radaelli (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003) whereby Europeanisation refers to: ‘Processes of (a) construction (b) diffusion and (c) institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU decisions and then incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures and public policies’. However, in the sphere of public cultural policy, this needs some tweaking given that cultural policy is a recent creation and that unique national characteristics shape the cultural and regional model (Dubois 1999; Dubois and Emmanuel 1999). Nevertheless, according to Sassatelli, “We can say that it is the combination of the convergence of EU Member States’ cultural policy objectives, with their broader involvement in projects fostered by the European Commission and whose long-term aim is to forge a common European identity or at least, a common consciousness of ‘unity in diversity’ (Sassatelli 2002, 2007). Yet the focus of this paper is not co-operation processes or convergence patterns among the various European countries. Rather, we shall analyse the basic and macro scales to see whether countries in Southern Europe converge or diverge from the European benchmark models – that is to say, The Central European Model and the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Model (Dubois 2016; Mulcahy 1998). Some aspects of the deepest-rooted ‘ways of doing things’ in the cultural policy field have been examined in relation to cultural agencies under each model (Rius-Ulldemolins and Arostegui 2013). Although this is an interesting subject, its complexity and the lack of up-to-date, comprehensive comparative studies on the subject mean that it cannot be dealt with in this paper.

5. This article does not focus on the processes of co-operation or convergence of cultural policy patterns in European countries as this issue has already been analysed by Sassatelli (Sassatelli 2002, 2007). Instead, we address the basic small and large-scale details of convergence or divergence from the European reference models, such as the Central European Model or the Anglo-Saxon Model, in Southern European countries (Dubois 2016; Mulcahy 1998). In a forthcoming paper, we intend to make a more global comparison based on Dubois’ notion of cultural policy regimes that take a definition of culture, priority aims, and instruments – to which we would add level of decentralisation and policy agency (Zamorano, Rius-Ulldemolins, and Bonet 2018; Rius-Ulldemolins and Arostegui 2013).

6. The Statistical Office of The European Commission provides data on cultural spending for the period 2008 to 2017: by absolute expenditure; by percentage of total public spending; as a percentage of GDP. For our research purposes, we chose spending by all tiers of government (General government) and that were classified as cultural services, within the section Recreation, Culture and Religion. To calculate spending per capita, we identified each country’s expenditure on cultural services and divided this by the population figures given by Eurostat in the section Population change – Demographic balance and crude rates at national level.

7. The long period of the study (the averages are based on the period 2009–2016) was chosen to iron out one or two-year variations and the impact of the crisis on certain countries, which could significantly affect the figures and make it harder to discern long-term trends in European cultural policy.

8. The sample in the 2013 Eurobarometer (one of the sources for our empirical analysis) only includes citizens of EU countries, excluding foreigners from ‘third countries’. Therefore, the results for cultural participation (whether in the form of cultural consumption and/or artistic activities) can only be generalised to EU citizens. Thus, the data did not include countries that were not EU members in 2013, which was (and is) the case with Norway and Switzerland.