The political economy of cultural spending: evidence from Italian cities

We investigate the relationship between Italian municipalities’ spending on culture in the 1990s and 2000s and a number of political variables—such as a left/right dummy, an election-year dummy and a term-limit indicator—controlling, among other things, for economic and socio-demographic characteristics of the population, the level of human capital and instruction, proxies of social capital, the extent of private financing of cultural provisions and touristic and artistic relevance. We use a panel-data regression analysis and find that, indeed, some determinants of public expenditures on culture are political. In particular, we identify an electoral cycle in which the incumbent spends less on culture in an election year. This result is robust for variations in the empirical model accounting for both the persistence and spatial interdependence of cultural expenditures by municipalities.     

COOLING OUT THE MARKS

Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from scapegoating individual bankers has narrowed the debate and stifled political imagination and mobilization. By investigating a range of media and policy responses to the meltdown, we conclude that the pre-credit crunch ideology of ‘no more boom and bust’ has been replaced by an equally ideological narrative that promises a re-normalization of processes of financialization. This allows for the preservation of key elements of neo-liberal capitalism as well as the marginalization of alternative projects. The paper shows how, exemplified by the establishment and operation of United Kingdom Financial Investments Ltd, the post-crisis ideology continues to shield financial markets from public scrutiny and intervention.     

Determinants of Public Cultural Expenditures: An Exploratory Time Series Analysis for Austria

Austria calls itself a ``cultural nation' as the arts, the performing arts (theaters) and museums, in particular, play an important role in public debate. However, the question arises as to whether public cultural expenditures as an indication of the significance of cultural policy are really as important when compared to other policy fields as political parties and the government try to suggest. A time series of public cultural expenditures for the period from 1967 to 1998 is taken as a basis for testing econometrically whether public expenditures (measured primarily as the ratio to GDP) follow a growth path. Based on tests for the stationarity of the time series of cultural expenditures in Austria, there are empirical indications that cultural expenditures, gross domestic product (GDP) and the relative price index (GDP and government expenditures) are cointegrated. Further econometric estimations (error-correction models) show that cultural expenditures increase with growing GDP but are vulnerable to short term fluctuations. Additionally, ``Baumol's cost disease' adds to the long-term growth of cultural expenditures. In the past the growth path of cultural expenditures has been stable and independent of the ideology of ruling parties, the form of government and political business cycles.     

Demand for culture in Spain and the 2012 VAT rise

This paper analyzes the effects that the 2012 VAT rise in Spain had on household’ demand for cultural goods and services. Household’ demands are modeled as a two-stage QUAIDS. After estimating price and expenditure elasticities, and the pass-through parameter associated with the reform, our results show that the individual welfare loss and the increment in the tax bill increase, but less than proportionately, with income. Consequently, the reform can be considered as regressive. Relating the effects of the VAT reform to households’ incomes also implies a low quantitative effect, because of the low proportion of total household expenditure that cultural expenditure represents. From a social perspective, the size of the induced welfare loss would positively depend on society’s inequality aversion. Regardless of the latter, it cannot be concluded whether the reform would have increased or reduced inequality in the distribution of cultural spending. Our results prove qualitatively robust to alternative values of the pass-through parameter.     

Rap as a Social and Political Revealer: Diam's and Changes in French Value Systems

Abstract

In 2006, a young female rapper named Diam's released an album that became the best‐selling CD in France: her CD and its reception is treated as a social phenomenon and examined against the backdrop of political arguments which developed in France in 2006–2007. Musical analysis shows that the sonic backgrounds of Diam's rap illustrated the importance of combinations and hard work in the symbolical production of a new order. Her texts manifested new combinations of social values which brought into the public debate changes in value systems that were just becoming developed enough to be taken up by political organisations and leaders. This is why the main themes in Diam's CD converged with topics engaged by the two main candidates in the French 2007 presidential election. This paper, combining the resources of musicology, literary analysis and political sociology analyses how Diam's put in aesthetic and emotional forms combinations of values that had been brewing underground for the past 30 years. It invites a reconsideration of the interpretation of rap as an expression of rebellion, or even as an element of counter‐culture, and apprehends it as a ‘social revealer’ that brings new values and representations into public debate and stimulates discussion around them. Diam's album was an ‘unidentified political object’ that shed original light on the way politics and politician are perceived by ordinary citizens, or specific groups among them, such as the youth.     

The power of names in a Chinese Indonesian family’s negotiations of politics,culture, and identities

Based on patterns of naming across four generations in first author Lie’s Chinese Indonesian family, we argue that naming practices are not just a function of personal taste or cultural habit but rather reflect negotiation of larger-scale political and historical conditions. We show that seeming contradictions and puzzles in the names and naming practices in Lie’s family can be explained by the specific social and political challenges faced by members of the family, particularly during the assimilation period of Suharto’s 1966–1998 reign. Both Lie’s family and the Indonesian state have treated names as having a high degree of constitutive power in these negotiations.     

Participation as Post-Fordist Politics: Demos,New Labour,and Science Policy

In recent years, British science policy has seen a significant shift ‘from deficit to dialogue’ in conceptualizing the relationship between science and the public. Academics in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have been influential as advocates of the new public engagement agenda. However, this participatory agenda has deeper roots in the political ideology of the Third Way. A framing of participation as a politics suited to post-Fordist conditions was put forward in the magazine Marxism Today in the late 1980s, developed in the Demos thinktank in the 1990s, and influenced policy of the New Labour government. The encouragement of public participation and deliberation in relation to science and technology has been part of a broader implementation of participatory mechanisms under New Labour. This participatory program has been explicitly oriented toward producing forms of social consciousness and activity seen as essential to a viable knowledge economy and consumer society. STS arguments for public engagement in science have gained influence insofar as they have intersected with the Third Way politics of post-Fordism.     

Cost-Benefit Analysis Using Economic Surpluses: A Case Study of a Televised Event

Economic impact studies based on short-run spending injections and multipliers lack conceptual ties to measures of economic surplus, fail to capture intangible benefits and generally fail to measure costs. In this case study of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) held in Israel in 1999, national benefits from the government-financed televising of the ESC are measured as producer surplus (approximated by private sector incremental profits), consumer surplus (measured as the incremental willingness to pay for an event staged at home) and government surplus (linked to national implicit benefits in the form of promotional advertising cost savings). The opportunity costs of diverting resources to this particular televised event are expressly included as an offset to these gross surplus benefits. Despite the conservative approach, the results show moderate social justification for public support of this high profile televised spectacle and suggest that a cost-benefit approach to cultural events can have wider applications.     

Between business and morality: cultural politics in independent bookshops in China

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how cultural businesses may facilitate contentious political activity in authoritarian contexts. Existing research in Western liberal democracies has shown the widespread political activism of actors in the cultural and creative industries. Whether such activism exists in authoritarian society, how it may differ in character and form, and what implications this will have for our understanding of relations between business, politics, and culture in authoritarian countries remain to be addressed. Drawing on data collected from 55 ‘independent bookshops’ in China, I illustrate how these organisations perform ‘cultural politics,’ a type of political participation in which actors employ mainly symbolic means to express social and political concerns. The organisations’ economic relations and conditions facilitate their efforts to create spaces in which contentious questions can be raised, sensitive topics explored, and alternative ideas expressed, despite the Chinese state’s political regulation of the cultural sphere. The finding of the economic embeddedness of cultural politics sheds new light on our understanding of the political economy of cultural businesses in contemporary China.     

Indigenous Digital Art as Politics in Australia

This essay contributes to discussions about Indigenous politics and debates about contemporary democracy. It uses a case study of video art produced by young indigenous people and a community development organisation in the Pilbara, Australia. Those involved in the project use digital media under the auspices of the Big hART Yijala Yala Project to produce an interactive comic series. The essay addresses the following questions: Do contemporary community development projects play a conservatising role serving the interests of a neoliberal polity? Given the long-standing practice of representing modern media as a vehicle for western domination what, if anything, do these projects imply about the political relations between Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australians? Are Indigenous media and cultural work inherently political? What conceptions of the political are at stake in such arguments? We focus on how certain groups of young people use new media, and how their activities are political. The argument is that Indigenous media like these are ‘inherently political’ because they are about efforts to reclaim the images of indigenous peoples for themselves.     

Brain power: cruel optimism and neuro-liberalism in the work of Catherine Malabou

ABSTRACT

One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy?     

Rethinking saving: Indian ceremonial gifts as relational and reproductive saving

ABSTRACT

Economic anthropology has long advocated a broader vision of savings than that proposed by economists. This article extends this redefinitional effort by examining ceremonial gifts in India and arguing that they are a specific form of savings. Rural households, including those at the bottom of the pyramid, do save, in the sense of storing, accumulating and circulating value. But this takes place via particular forms of mediation that allow savers to forge or maintain social and emotional relations, to keep control over value – what matters in people’s lives – and over spaces and their own future. We propose terming these practices relational and reproductive saving, insofar as their main objective is to sustain life across generations. By contrast, trying to encourage saving via bank mediation may dispossess populations of control over their wealth, their socialisation, their territories and their time. In an increasingly financialised world of evermore aggressive policies to push people into financial inclusion, the social, symbolic, cultural and political aspects of diverse forms of financial mediation deserve our full attention.     

Cultural participation in Europe: Can we identify common determinants?

This article examines the extent to which demographic and socioeconomic characteristics influence the decision to visit and the number of visits to museums, art galleries, historical monuments, and archaeological sites. Using ordered probit models based on data for 350,000 adults in 24 EU countries, we find that the likelihood and number of such visits depend mainly on per capita household income, education, labor market status, and country of birth. Attained characteristics such as education and income have remarkably similar positive effects on cultural participation across the countries in our sample, while the effects of age and gender are both weaker and less consistent across countries. We conclude that cultural distinctions along the lines of socioeconomic attainment are stable even in very different country contexts with varying cultural policies and economic conditions. We discuss the way these results inform three research topics: identification of the characteristics of visitors to museums and historical sites in order to attract new audiences; the effect of public spending on culture on accessibility to cultural sites; and cross-national variation in cultural stratification.     

Moving On? Excurses on Cultural Studies,Phenomenology, Bildung and Kultur

Abstract

This paper takes a meta‐perspective on the theoretical grounding of cultural studies since the late 1970s. It suggests a realisation of the possibilities of both classic phenomenological thought for the field and cultural studies’ continued connections to traditional cultural concepts such as Bildung and Kultur. Of particular importance are relations among cultural studies’ semiotic‐political and economic engagement with culture, phenomenological concepts of Umwelt and historical conceptions of Bildung and Kultur. While arguing that thinking through these relations provides an intellectual route forward for cultural studies, the paper recognises that such intellectual configurations also resonate with earlier models of cultural studies from the 1950s and ’60s.     

山东地区文化遗产保护社区内外民众参与机制研究

山东地区文化遗产保护过程中,社区内外民众积极参与、通力合作已经成为文化遗产保护中必不可少的力量。社区内部民众的主动参与,从确立社区民众的文化自觉、完善社区民众的参与机制、注重对社区传承人的保护和拓展文化遗产产业链来实现。社区外部民众的积极参与,从提高外部民众参与积极性、保障外部民众知情权力、创新外部民众参与合作手段和注重外部民众的教育效果来实现。     

Subjective well-being in cultural advocacy: a politics of research between the market and the academy

This paper responds to a trend of contracting out subjective well-being econometrics to demonstrate social return on investment (SROI) for evidence-based policy-making. We discuss an evolving ecology of ‘external’ research taking place ‘between’ the academy and commercial consultancy. We then contextualise this as waves of research methodologies and consultancy for the cultural sector. The new model of ‘external between’ consultancy research for policy is not only placed between the University and the market, but also facilitates discourse between policy sectors, government, the media and the academy. Specifically, it enables seductive but selective arguments for advocacy that claim authority through academic affiliation, yet are not evaluated for robustness. To critically engage with an emergent form of what Stone calls ‘causal stories’, we replicate a publicly funded externally commissioned SROI model that argues for the value of cultural activities to well-being. We find that the author’s operationalisation of participation and well-being are crucial, yet their representation of the relationship problematic, and their estimates questionable. This case study ‘re-performs’ econometric modelling national-level survey data for the cultural sector to reveal practices that create norms of expertise for policy-making that are not rigorous. We conclude that fluid claims to authority allow experimental econometric models and measures to perform across the cultural economy as if ratified. This new model of advocacy research requires closer academic consideration given the changing research funding structures and recent attention to expertise and the contracting out of public services.     

中国历史文化名城保护公益诉讼研究——以北京市为例

保护以北京为代表的国家历史文化名城需要与时俱进,如何以法治思维和法治方式对历史文化名城的保护工作固本强基,是当下面临的一项重要使命与重大课题。近年来全国多地的实践结果显示,公益诉讼为将历史文化名城保护纳入法治轨道提供了有效抓手,其不仅有利于激发社会公众的参与热情,而且也有助于发挥司法机关的监督力量。然而,将公益诉讼机制引入历史文化名城保护工作并非轻而易举,需要全国人大、地方政府、检察机关各司其职、齐抓共管,只有切实做到制度供给充分、政策支持到位、资源配置合理,才能为更好地保护以北京为代表的历史文化名城提供足够法治支撑。     

古都洛阳历史文化资源点微信公众号传播研究

城市文化是一座城市的核心竞争力和名片,而古都代表着一座城市辉煌灿烂的历史,浸透着不同阶段不同程度上的中华传统文化。随着新媒体时代的到来,微信等新媒体为古都城市文化的传播提供了新的载体和呈现形式。以古都洛阳历史文化资源点的微信公众号为例,选取代表古都洛阳城市历史文化形象的20个历史资源点的公众账号,从组织机构定位、信息发布、内容构成三方面分析,发现了洛阳历史文化资源点微信公众号在意识形态、传播内容、传播效果和运营管理等方面的问题,并力图提出更为有效的解决方案。     

Acceleration Nation: An Investigation into the Violence of Speed and the Uses of Accidents in Iceland

Abstract

There are two starting points from which this paper is constructed: first, Virilio’s observation that the wealth of societies is founded on their dromocratic condition, that the faster societies accelerate their citizens, commercial goods and communication the more political and economic power they have and, second, the links that he traces between technologies of speed and acceleration and the accident. We suggest that Virilio’s ideas on this invite and deserve a closer ethnographic scrutiny than they have so far received, scrutiny that highlights the varied ways in which speed, acceleration and the accident are articulated in different cultural contexts. To this end we offer an investigation into the dromocratic condition, the violence of speed and the uses of accidents in Iceland.     

Ownership,organization structure and public service provision: the case of museums

This article provides an empirical investigation of the effects of the ownership and organizational structure on the performance of cultural institutions. More specifically, we consider how museums are effective in their function of disseminating culture to audiences and contributing to the local development. By exploiting a unique data set based on the 2011 census of Italian museums, we develop performance indices of accessibility, visitors’ experience, web visibility and promotion of the local cultural context. Using count data models, we regress such measures on the type of organization. We distinguish between governmental museums, public museums whose administration is either outsourced or has financial autonomy and private museums. We control for the most salient characteristics of a museum, competition pressure and some proxies of potential audience. Our evidence shows that private museums, public museums with financial autonomy and outsourced museums outperform public museums run as sub-units of culture departments. This paper contributes to the cultural economics and public policy and administration literature by adding insights into the effect of outsourcing and administrative decentralization in the public cultural sector.