From Public Support for the Arts to Cultural Policy

Although public funding for the arts had been an element of budget and appropriations business at both the federal and state levels for over a quarter century, the idea that policy justifies and directs these resource allocations has been slow to emerge. This article provides a historiographical discussion of how the issue was framed and of the resistance to the term “cultural policy” through reference to contextual, political, and epistemic factors. It then uses four presidential reports ranging from 1953 to 1997 to track the evolution of political language concerning the policy definition of the arts and culture, the roles and responsibilities of the federal government regarding these, and the emergence of a range of policy issues beyond public funding.     

In Search of Public Accountability: The 'Wenling Model' in China

This article specifically attempts to answer two interrelated research questions: firstly, how do democratic consultation assemblies (DCAs) heighten public accountability in the current institutional setting of China's sub-provincial localities?; and secondly, what can be learned, from the Chinese case, in relation to achieving public accountability elsewhere? To address the first question, this article will explore two particular variations of the DCAs, and will focus on the interplay between the managerial and democratic accountability orientations to address the second question.     

(De)Composing Public Value: In Search of Basic Dimensions and Common Ground

ABSTRACT

In re-emphasizing public organizations’ societal and related normative functions, public value (PV) discourse is one way of approaching public sector performance. Although PV research is flourishing, empirical studies are still lacking. We provide evidence of the basic dimensions of PV creation in Germany's Federal Labor Agency. The results suggest a three-part factor structure and a second-order factor, indicating a broad notion of performance across different constituencies. The factors provide a framework to measure any public organization's perceived PV contribution. Our study complements the existing process perspective of PV, as developed by Moore (1995).     

In Search of the Uncovered Set

e-mail: nmiller{at}umbc.edu This paper pursues a number of theoretical explorations andconjectures pertaining to the uncovered set in spatial votinggames. It was stimulated by the article "The Uncovered Set andthe Limits of Legislative Action" by W. T. Bianco, I. Jeliazkov,and I. Sened (2004, Political Analysis 12:256–78) thatemployed a grid-search computational algorithm for estimatingthe size, shape, and location of the uncovered set, and it hasbeen greatly facilitated by access to the CyberSenate spatialvoting software being developed by Joseph Godfrey. I bring tolight theoretical considerations that account for importantfeatures of the Bianco, Jeliazkov, and Sened results (e.g.,the straight-line boundaries of uncovered sets displayed insome of their figures, the "unexpectedly large" uncovered setsdisplayed in other figures, and the apparent sensitivity ofthe location of uncovered sets to small shifts in the relativesizes of party caucuses) and present theoretical insights ofmore general relevance to spatial voting theory.     

The Impact of Public Funding on Contemporary Visual Arts

Public policy for supporting the visual arts has historically followed different traditions in France and the United Kingdom. In an environment of fiscal austerity that impacts upon public funding as well as private patronage, and given the tensions between artistic freedom on the one hand, and market constraints on the other, this article examines how these two traditions of financing artists has influenced the direction of the work itself. A brief historical presentation of the two forms of public support and their evolution in recent decades provides a framework for understanding government attitudes and policies on both sides of the Channel. A closer examination of selected artists, chosen here for their representativeness and their international renown, is used to illustrate the changing nature of public support for visual art creation.     

Dilemmas in Policy Support for the Arts and Cultural Sector

This article questions the specific challenges that the management of culture poses for government.² Unlike some ‘public good’ policy domains, such as prisons, defence or infrastructure, or benefit provisions such as unemployment, disability or health measures, the complex area of cultural policy cannot be justified in instrumental terms as an essential ‐ or unavoidable ‐ policy of government. Nonetheless, the cultural lobby is an effective and indefatigable pressure on government. The area of culture is just one small component of the public agenda that governments are obliged to support. Given other pressing portfolios, why do governments continue to take an interest in culture? Moreover, recent government policies seem to be setting up problems for the future such that governments will find it hard if not impossible to extricate themselves from a problematic relationship. So, what is the hold that culture has over governments? Traditionally, the answer seemed to be a combination of boosterism and cultural capital. Governments liked to bask in the reflected glory of cultural success believing that it contributed to their legitimacy and cultural competence. The glow of elite culture was seen to rub off onto political incumbents and their regimes. But in an age of pressures on government to justify public expenditure and meet accountability regimes, cultural support continues to appear on the funding agenda and governments continue to become embroiled in debates about competing support formulae. This relates to both the nature of ‘culture’ and broader definitions under the banner of ‘cultural policy’ as well as the nature of the sector which is, at once, elitist, institutionalized, commercial, highly specialist, niche and industry ‐ all premised on intangible nature of ‘creativity’. Paradoxically, contrary to other trends in public policy, arts and cultural funding has reverted to forms of patronage as the centrepiece of broadly defined policies of access, equity and self‐sufficiency. How has this policy portfolio managed to buck the trends of other domains of government attention? This article attempts to open some new ways of examining the question.³     

Public Opinion and the Role of Government Arts Funding in Spain

While several studies have probed the determinants of public support for government funding of arts and culture in the United States, little work to date has addressed the question in Europe. Yet as private cultural funding increases in magnitude in most Western European countries, the answer to this question has policy implications. This article formalizes the theory of the determinants of this public support in a model, employs public opinion data from Spain to estimate this model, and compares the results with those from the U.S. I find that support in Spain increases strongly with age, but is insignificant in most other variables. The article's empirical results yield several lessons for cultural policy design.     

In Pursuit of the Public Interest

What does the injunction “serve the public interest” really mean for public managers, and why is it important? By way of an answer, this analysis systematizes different perspectives on the public interest and offers a multifaceted formulation of the public manager’s duty. It is a process involving the exploration of two concerns—democracy and mutuality—in the current time frame and two others—sustainability and legacy—in the future time frame.     

Public Sector Priority Setting Using Decision Support Tools

The public sector is in transition in many countries, including New Zealand, and many government departments have been restructured so as to increase transparency and accountability in their decision‐making by implementing fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes and information systems. New frameworks are also needed for tasks such as priority setting, and this paper describes the framework developed to assist the then NZ Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) in setting priorities for the allocation of research funds. This comprised a participative process including a series of workshops using both GroupSystems software for electronic meeting support and Visual Interactive Sensitivity Analysis (VISA) software to facilitate a multi‐criteria decision analysis.     

A Question of Morality: Artists' Values and Public Funding for the Arts

In 1989, the combination of art, religion, homosexuality, ana¹ public dollars set off an explosive two-year battle and a decade of skirmishes over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. To promote artistic freedom and to avoid political controversy, federal arts policy delegates specific funding decisions to private donors and arts professionals. In an era of morality politics—hot-button issues driven by deeply held beliefs rather than by expertise—that strategy no longer works. Artists, donors, and arts audiences diverge widely from the rest of the American public in their attitudes toward religion, sexual morality, and civil liberties, as General Social Survey data show. Delegating funding decisions to them has naturally led to some subsidies of art offensive to important segments of the population.     

In Search of Prudence: The Hidden Problem of Managerial Reform

This article argues that the concept of prudence can provide valuable insights into the problems of the New Public Management. Prudence, or practical wisdom, is the ability to make sound decisions under complex, ever-changeable conditions. Old-style bureaucracy severely limited the discretion of most administrators but preserved a site of true prudential judgment at the peak where discreet "mandarins" policed the boundary between politics and administration. The reforms that inaugurated New Public Management dismantled this site of prudence while simultaneously attempting, in effect, to disperse prudential judgment and action throughout the service. Though raising the problem of prudence, these reforms misconceived it as the problem of how to balance new freedoms with new controls to prevent abuse or folly. This essay argues that the introduction of market mechanisms, risk-management and cost-benefit techniques, ethics training, performance accountability, and calls to leadership were destined to fail because they misapprehended the problem of prudence.     

Public Support for Referendums: The Role of the Media

Previous research is unclear about which citizens support the use of referendums and how a referendum campaign can affect support for direct democracy. This study investigates, first, the factors that determine support for referendums and, second, the role of the campaign in changing support. This is done in the context of the 2005 Dutch EU Constitution referendum. A media content analysis of national media (N = 6,370) is combined with panel survey data (N = 1,008). The results suggest that those who felt more politically disaffected were more supportive of referendums. Furthermore, higher levels of exposure to tabloid style campaign news led to increased approval of referendums. In a second step, the mechanism behind this effect was tested using an experiment (N = 580). When exposed to negative tabloid style news about a referendum proposal, opponents perceive the assumed consequences as more of a threat. This threat perception increased their support for a referendum on the issue at stake as a means to prevent the proposal. The article concludes with a discussion about the conditions under which a dynamic like this is likely to unfold and when alternative explanations for referendum support apply.     

In Search of a Home: In Honour of Agnes Heller on her 75th Birthday

Abstract

One of the many themes to which Agnes Heller's philosophy returns again and again is the theme of the home of the moderns. Although not necessarily her central philosophical theme, nonetheless, it opens onto the existential and multi-dimensional nature of the human condition in modernity, which her work permanently addresses.     

Understanding Public Support for British Membership of the Single Currency

There has been much public debate about whether a referendum on British membership of the European single currency could be won despite opinion polls showing a widening gap between those opposed to membership and those in favour. However, academic research provides little insight into why British attitudes towards the Euro vary at an individual level, and hence what factors might be crucial in a referendum campaign. Existing studies suggest, among other things, that British political parties can shape voters' preferences on important public policy issues. We explore this and other explanations using data from recent Eurobarometer and British Elections Study surveys. We find that general evaluations of the EU, British national identity and concerns over the democratic character of EU governance are stronger predictors of support for the single currency than which party a person supports. However, we also find that the influence of these factors varies with a citizen's level of information about the Euro, which suggests that the supply and use of information might be crucial in a referendum campaign.