Abstract
In the last decades, policy discussions have increasingly considered participation in arts and cultural activities as a vehicle to reach broader social policy goals, such as social inclusion or active citizenship. However, convincing empirical evidence on the social impacts of arts and culture is still scarce. In particular, little attention has been given to the impact that cultural participation may have on individuals’ engagement in civil society, especially in Europe. In order to address this lack of evidence, this paper explores the connection between cultural participation and civic participation in Italy using Likert-scale data collected in the ISTAT “Aspetti della Vita Quotidiana” Survey (2014). To do so, two composite indicators—the participation in cultural life indicator and the participation in civic life indicator—have been built using an approach based on partial order theory and the concept of Average Rank. The effect of cultural participation on civic engagement has been estimated using a quantile regression model which controls for potentially cofounding factors such as education, income, age and gender. Results do confirm that participation in arts and cultural activities is highly correlated with participation in civic life. It is particularly worth noticing that at higher levels of civic participation, cultural participation has a positive and strong effect on civic engagement of people having a low educational level.
Highlights
The role that participation in arts and cultural activities can play in the achievement of broader social policy goals, such as countering social exclusion or promoting active citizenship, is increasingly addressed in the international cultural policy debate
Following the most influential works in the field of Cultural Statistics that deal with empirical measurements (European Commission 2012; UNESCO 2009), the present paper delimits the scope of participation in cultural life using the construct of the “cultural domains” and including four of them, namely: Cultural Heritage, Performing Arts, Books and Press, Audio and Audiovisual Media and Multimedia
As the measurement of participation in cultural and civic life implies the comparison of individuals in relation to multiple variables of ordinal type, we have opted for the poset approach and the connected Average Rank (AR) method in the construction of the composite indicators participation in cultural life (PCULT) and participation in civic life (PCIVIC)
Summary
The role that participation in arts and cultural activities can play in the achievement of broader social policy goals, such as countering social exclusion or promoting active citizenship, is increasingly addressed in the international cultural policy debate. Catterall et al 2012; Delaney and Keaney 2006; Hill 2008; Jeannotte 2003; Leroux and Bernadska 2014; National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 2009; Polzella and Forbis 2016; Stern and Seifert 2009), often finding a positive correlation between at least some forms of cultural participation (e.g. attending music concerts) and civic engagement variables such as volunteering, donating or interpersonal trust These studies, cannot explain the causal mechanisms that connect participation in cultural and civic life due to the difficulty of disentangling such complex, multi-faceted and often “nested” phenomena. The results concerning the relationship between the two indicators are presented and discussed, underlying the possible policy implications of our findings and proposals for future research
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