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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The Rehnquist Court and Federal Preemption: In Search of a Theory

In the 1980s, the U. S. Supreme Court was expected to becomemore solicitous of "states' rights" and to reconsider doctrinesof federal preemption of state and local laws. Those expectationswere built on the Court's ruling in National League of Citiesv. Usery and reinforced by the Reagan administration's rhetoricand Court appointments. The record ofthe Rehnquist Court, however,demonstrates that it has backed away from vigorously enforcingthe Tenth Amendment and has erected only minor constitutionalbarriers, as in New York v. United States, to the Congress'power over the states. Moreover, the Court has not retreatedfrom finding implied statutory preemptions or from imposingits own dormant-commerce clause power on the states. The articleconcludes by considering a number of explanations for the Court'srecord and rulings on federal preemption.     

Explaining Public Support for Counterproductive Homelessness Policy: The Role of Disgust

Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support. In recent years, however, state and local governments have increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, that are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet these policies also garner substantial support from the public. Given that programs aiding the homeless are so popular, why are these counterproductive policies also popular? We argue that disgust plays a key role in the resolution of this puzzle. While disgust does not decrease support for aid policies or even generate negative affect towards homeless people, it motivates the desire for physical distance, leading to support for policies that exclude homeless people from public life. We test this argument using survey data, including a national sample with an embedded experiment. Consistent with these expectations, our findings indicate that those respondents who are dispositionally sensitive to disgust are more likely to support exclusionary policies, such as banning panhandling, but no less likely to support policies intended to aid homeless people. Furthermore, media depictions of the homeless that include disease cues activate disgust, increasing its impact on support for banning panhandling. These results help explain the popularity of exclusionary homelessness policies and challenge common perspectives on the role of group attitudes in public life.