Resources for Studying Public Participation in the Arts: Inventory and Review of Available Survey Data on North Americans' Participation in and Attitudes Towards the Arts

This study contains summaries, critical reviews, and access information for 25 studies of public participation in the arts, as well as a chart enabling readers to indentify surveys that contain particular combinations of variables in which they are interested.

From the 'Digital Divide' to 'Digital Inequality': Studying Internet Use as Penetration Increases

The authors of this paper contend that as Internet penetration increases, students of inequality of access to the new information technologies should shift their attention from the "digital divide" - inequality between "haves" and "have-nots" differentiated by dichotomous measures of access to or use of the new technologies - to digital inequality, by which we refer not just to differences in access, but also to inequality among persons with formal access to the Internet. After reviewing data on Internet penetration, the paper describes five dimensions of digital inequality - in equipment, autonomy of use, skill, social support, and the purposes for which the technology is employed - that deserve additional attention. In each case, hypotheses are developed to guide research, with the goal of developing a testable model of the relationship between individual characteristics, dimensions of inequality, and positive outcomes of technology use. Finally, because the rapidity of organizational as well as technical change means that it is difficult to presume that current patterns of inequality will persist into the future, the authors call on students of digital inequality to study institutional issues in order to understand patterns of inequality as evolving consequences of interactions among firms' strategic choices, consumers' responses, and government policies.Digital divide, Internet, World Wide Web, computer use, social inequality

Information Inequality and Network Externalities: A Comparative Study of the Diffusion of Television and the Internet

This paper sheds light on whether intergroup inequality in Internet access is likely to persist as the diffusion process continues. To what extent is a given level of inequality in technology diffusion (e.g., use of the Internet) a long-term policy challenge or a temporary inconvenience? What general factors account for group-specific patterns of technology adoption? This paper draws on notions of network externalities to help answer this question. It also presents findings from a comparative analysis of household adoption of television from 1948 to 1957 and the Internet from 1994 to 2002.

Public Opinion and Political Vulnerability: Why Has the National Endowment for the Arts Been Such an Attractive Target?

Federal government arts programs appear to deviate from the rule that legislative behavior closely follows public preferences. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, despite stability in public opinion, the NEA evolved from Congress’s bipartisan darling to its controversial scapegoat. We inspect 55 items from public opinion surveys and re-analyze data from 2 state and 8 national surveys undertaken between 1975 and 1996 to resolve this puzzle. Our conclusions: (1) Arts support is not a salient issue to most voters, leaving legislators relatively unconstrained. (2) Positive responses to general questions about arts funding often mask complex, ambivalent views. (3) The core constituency for federal arts support – college graduates – is difficult to mobilize because their interest in the arts is balanced by skepticism about federal government programs. (4) Opponents of arts spending successfully built on ties to Christian conservative and Republican loyalists to mobilize the stable minorities opposed to the NEA. As a result, arts politics in the U.S. has consisted of a standoff between a committed minority of 15 to 20 percent of the public that strongly opposes federal support for the arts and a weakly committed majority of about 60 percent that favors the federal role.

Studies of Artists: An Annotated Directory

This annotated directory documents more than 80 different studies of artist populations. The directory provides information about how the researcher in each study has defined the artist and identified the population. Studies are arranged by type of artist population and, within each category, by study date. Each entry indicates, in so far as possible from available materials, the study investigator, the artist population, the way in which artists were identified, sampling procedures, number of respondents and response rates, and publications based on the study. This directory should provide researchers and other interested parties with a range of definitions, identification methods, and sampling procedures currently used in studies of artists. The introduction to the directory provides a critical overview of the numerous methods for identifying and defining "artists."

Public Sentiments Towards the Arts: A Critical Reanalysis of 13 Opinion Surveys

This paper summarizes and reviews studies of public perceptions of and sentiments towards the arts. It provides the first critical synthesis of such research based upon original secondary analyses of thirteen of the major data sets collected between 1973 and 1993. In so doing, it reports on what the surveys tell us about several questions of pressing interest to policy makers and others interested in the role of the arts in American society. To what extent do Americans support government funding of the arts, and from what level of government? To what extent do Americans believe that it is important for children to learn about the arts and that the arts are worthy of inclusion in the school curriculum? To what extent do Americans regard the arts as fundamentally important for the quality of community life, on the one hand, or the domain of a select few, on the other? To what extent do sentiments vary between men and women, African-Americans and Euro-Americans, the highly educated and the less schooled, the old and the young, and the wealthy and the less well off? And finally, what, if anything, can we infer about how these patterns have changed over time?

The Sporting News Questionnaire for Joe DiMaggio

The Sporting News Questionnaire for Joe DiMaggi

Nonprofit Organizations and the Intersectoral Division of Labor in the Arts

This paper takes stock of what we know about the role of nonprofit enterprise in the production and distribution of the arts (broadly defined), primarily in the United States. After briefly discussing measurement, I present data on the extent of nonprofit activity in a range of cultural subfields. I then review theoretical explanations of the prevalence of nonprofits in cultural industries and discuss some puzzles that existing theories do not adequately solve. After reviewing research and theory about behavioral differences between nonprofit and for-profit arts firms, I explore how the art-and-culture sector is evolving in the face of demographic change, the weakening of the cultural hierarchy, and the emergence of new production and distribution technologies. I conclude with a research agenda.

The Role of Religion in Public Conflicts over the Arts in the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

How would we characterize the relationship between religion and the arts in the Philadelphia area between 1965 and 1997? The late 1980s and early 1990s in Philadelphia followed a decade that was unusually free of contention between religion and the arts. In comparison to the 1970s and early 1980s, religious participation in cultural conflict was not particularly high during the "culture-war" era. However, religious discourse as opposed to participation did play a role in more controversies during the late 1980s and 1990s. The findings also suggest that after 1986 religious actors and their allies were far more likely to employ the tools of social-movement mobilization and to connect their own claims to national social movements or campaigns.