Cultural policy in political science research

The securitisation of cultural heritage

“…These ideas were also contemporaneous with a vigorous cultural policy debate: like science and technology, culture was deemed an important social and political resource and its development was not to be left to chance. In the wake of World War II, the national and international frameworks for state cultural policy, rooted in long-standing developments of private sponsorship, were born (Paquette and Beauregard 2017;Upchurch 2016;O'Brien 2014;Belfiore and Bennett 2008;Dubois 1999).…”

“…The essays that form this special issue address this gap by specifically focusing on processes, analysing the cases of organisational agency in state cultural policy. In doing so, the authors draw their inspiration from neo-institutional theory (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Powell and DiMaggio 1991), which has become influential in cultural policy scholarship studying policy processes (O'Brien 2014;McGuigan 2004;Gray 2000;Paquette and Beauregard 2017), policy transfer (Rindzevičiūtė, Tomson, and Svensson 2016;Prince 2015;O'Connor 2004) and policy and cultural work (Khan 2019;Comunian and Conor 2017;Banks 2017). Although the uses of neo-institutional theory in organisation and management studies has been criticised for being vague (Alvesson and Spicer 2019), its usefulness for cultural policy research has not been exhausted yet: the institutional approach enables us to bridge the long-standing binaries of ideology and practice, individual creativity and bureaucracy and, which is particularly important in an East European context, governmental control and freedom.…”

How can cultural policy strengthen the arts and cultural sector?

“…As a type of public policy, cultural policy can take many forms depending on the government of the day (Paquette & Beauregard 2017). In heading towards a workable definition of cultural policy, Cairney's (2020) definition of public policy, which is 'the sum total of government action, from signals of intent to the final outcome' (p2), provides a useful start.…”

“…It will be positioned as normative -whatever its form and praxis -as a field that continues to merit enquiry, analysis, and development. Paquette and Beauregard (2017) argue that cultural policy is a subfield of public policy and 'not an extremely important one' (p20) in relation to larger government portfolios and policy realms such as health, education, and environment. Ahearne (2009) highlights the irony of cultural policy in that it can be peripheral and insubstantive to governments, then suddenly central and fundamental -he describes this as an 'oscillating ambiguity' (p141).…”

“…Others opt for strategies that support arts and culture as a sub sector of a larger industry, as was apparent during the early 2000s creative industries era (Hesmondhalgh, Nisbett, Oakley & Lee 2015). Therefore, to land on a workable definition of cultural policy that reflects its positioning as an analysable field of public policy, the ambiguous nature of culture itself will not be investigated, since this has been covered extensively by policy scholars (Throsby 2007, Williams 2012, Paquette et al 2017. The emphasis remains on the policy realm.…”