Understanding State Spending on the Arts, 1976–99

Abstract

citizens and politicians to influence discretionary policy. At the federal level, arts policy appears to reflect the agendas of po litical elites rather than public demands, as illustrated by the evolution of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Funding for the program, which was founded by the Democrats in 1965 largely as a tribute to Pr?s. John F. Kennedy, increased during the first 15 years of its existence at a much more rapid rate than did the federal budget. Republicans stopped expanding the NEAs budget in the 1980s and cut it in half after gaining control of Congress in 1994. These drastic political measures did not correspond with the inten sity of public sentiment toward the arts, how ever. The only major public outcry over the NEA?the 1989-90 controversy over whether it was funding indecent, blasphemous art? had minimal immediate impact on its budget (DiMaggio and Pettit 1999; Lewis 2006). Patterns in less frequently examined state arts spending tell a somewhat different story. State arts agencies jointly spend substantially more than the NEA (Schuster 2002). In 2006, for instance, states appropriated $327.5 mil lion for the arts?more than double the NEA