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ABSTRACT
This article proposes a novel approach to cultural policies and cultural policy change, drawing on public policy and institutional analysis to study how decision-making power is distributed between actors in the public and private sectors and at different state levels, as well as the precise roles of public administrations, elected officials and cultural actors. Indeed, rather than directly defining cultural policy, laws on culture mostly designate actors in charge of policy implementation. Based on an empirical application of this analytical framework to the case of Swiss cantons and focusing specifically on the positions of cultural actors, findings show that cultural policies are transformed in different ways, affording more or less power to actors from the cultural sector in implementation arrangements generally dominated by administrative actors.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Clive Gray, Frédéric Varone, André Ducret and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. UNESCO’s Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist, adopted in 1980, advises member states to ‘have the opinions of artists and the professional and trade union organizations representing them […] taken carefully into account in the formulation and execution of their cultural policies’ (UNESCO Citation1980, 9).
2. See, for instance, the new Swiss Law on the encouragement of culture (2012), available online here: https://www.admin.ch/opc/fr/classified-compilation/20070244/201701010000/442.1.pdf (in French).
3. A fourth type, the ‘engineer state’, is sometimes included to account for cases like the USSR, where artistic production is directly managed by the state according to political and social criteria.
4. Other policy domains can function this way as well, with broad laws which define procedures rather than specific content.
5. This article thus focuses on public financing of culture and does not treat other (e.g. regulatory or redistributive) aspects of cultural policy.
6. Few publications exist on Swiss cultural policies, exceptions include several general overviews (Weckerle and Theler Citation2010; Gillabert et al. Citation2011; Keller Citation2011; Bijl-Schwab Citation2014; Thévenin and Moeschler Citation2018) and studies focused on urban cultural policies (Kellenberger Citation1988; Rothmayr Citation1995; Raboud Citation2015).
7. Federal Statistical Office, most recent data for 2015: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/statistiken/kultur-medien-informationsgesellschaft-sport/kultur/kulturfinanzierung.html.
8. Migros is one on the two main supermarket chains in Switzerland and is set up as a cooperative. Following the wishes of its founder, one percent of its total revenue is reserved for social and cultural projects. Around 30 million CHF are attributed to cultural projects annually, making it one of the main financers of arts and culture in Switzerland.
9. This diagram is a summary, and ‘private actors’ here covers all non-state actors, including both private funders (banks, patrons, sponsors) and cultural actors and artists. These actors are then differentiated in the detailed analysis of each case.
10. Per the data from the Federal Statistical Office: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/fr/home/statistiques/culture-medias-societe-information-sport/culture/financement/public.assetdetail.4062192.html .
11. Other studies have adopted a similar approach to comparing Swiss cantons and highlighting similarities and differences in the adoption of policies (Strebel and Widmer Citation2012; Sager and Rielle Citation2013) or in the implementation of national policies (Sager and Thomann Citation2017), using either all 26 cantons or a selection of cases.
12. Six cantons (out of 26) adopted a new law on culture between 2005 and 2013: Geneva, Basel-Stadt, Bern, Aargau, Appenzell Ausserrhoden and Schaffhausen. Issues of comparability and access of these policy-making processes and their outcomes led to the final case selection.
13. I spoke to administrators, cultural actors, politicians and experts selected because they participated in and had in-depth knowledge of one or several of these processes. Interviews were held between March 2013 and June 2015 in different Swiss cities.
14. This article focuses on formal processes and outcomes of policy formulation. Of course, informal processes are also important, particularly in policy implementation.
15. Horizontal coordination mechanisms in cultural policy have existed for some time (since 1970 for cities, 1988 for cantons), and in 2010, the ‘national cultural dialogue’ was created, a vertical policy coordination forum bringing together cities, cantons and the federal state.
16. The cultural policy of the canton is not coordinated with the interventions of any private bodies, with the exception of the Bern Historical Museum, which is co-managed by the Burgergemeinde Bern (a private body composed of the descendants of Bern’s patrician families), the canton and the city of Bern.
17. The division of tasks varies between cantons. For instance, primary schools are run by the municipalities in the German-speaking part and by the canton in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. In Geneva, only a few sectors (sports, culture) are municipal competencies.
18. Basel-Landschaft, associated with Basel-Stadt in the cultural contract, was occasionally consulted.
19. The importance of federalism in Bern may be linked to its status as the only non-city-canton in my sample, but the reduced role of expert committees is specific to Berne (they hold more weight in many other cantons, e.g. Zurich).
20. This example shows that actors who hold a strong position in sectoral policy can be defeated when several policies are negotiated at the same time and serves as a strong argument in favor of studying cultural policy as one public policy inextricably linked to others.
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Lisa Marx
Lisa Marx is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut français de l’éducation (French Institute of Education) at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Her research and publications focus on cultural sociology, public policy and art education. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Geneva and a MA in sociology from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.