Michael Rushton

Understanding State Spending on the Arts, 1976–99:

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

Support for Earmarked Public Spending on Culture: Evidence from a Referendum in Metropolitan Detroit

327.5 mil lion for the arts?more than double the NEA

The Moral Rights of Artists: Droit Moral ou Droit Pécuniaire?

Using the precinct-level voting results of a 2002 referendum in Metropolitan Detroit to increase property taxes, with the proceeds earmarked for cultural institutions, this paper inquires into the pattern of voting support for an increased public funding of culture. The estimation matches voting precincts to census tracts, and employs tract-level economic and demographic data. Results are compared with public opinion survey data from the United States and a similar referendum in Switzerland.

Cultural Diversity and Public Funding of the Arts: A View from Cultural Economics

An artists moral rights consist of the right to be identified as the creator of a work (Attribution), the right to decide when and whether to publish the work (Disclosure), the right to withdraw a work from circulation (Withdrawal), and the right to preserve the integrity of the work (Integrity). As there are two main schools of thought on the monetary aspects of copyright, so are there two schools on moral rights. Canada embodies two legal traditions, and so provides an interesting case study of moral rights legislation. The main interests for economists studying moral rights are (i) the extent to which moral rights should be tied to monetary rights, and (ii) the extent to which moral rights should be alienable.

Political oversight of arts councils: A comparison of Canada and the United States

conomic arguments in favor of public funding of the arts are familiar to E virtually all students of cultural policy, even if they are not economists by training. But the economic analysis of why the marketplace alone might provide an inadequate level of support for the arts and the rationales for public assistance were born in an era when it was assumed that everybody-or at least those who made public policy-knew what kind of art was worthy of subsidy. Representative of this traditional view are statements by two of the most prominent public economists of the middle of the twentieth century: “The only valid argument for government aid to the arts is that it is a means of educating the public’s taste and that the public would benefit from a more educated taste” (Scitovsky 1972, 68); and “[Ils there not a . . . case for public patronage of the arts, some general encouragement of high excellence in culture-in the visual arts, in music, and in the theatre? To this question, I . . . would answer unhesitatingly yes” (Robbins 1963, 56-57). Neither Robbins nor Scitovsky had to explain that by “the arts” they meant the canon of high European art, because at that time it would have been thought so obvious as to be not worth making explicit. When there is a clear definition of what counts as art from the perspective of public policy, as in Baumol and Bowen’s famous work outlining the causes and consequences of rising costs in the arts, the live performing arts consist only of “the legitimate theater, the symphony orchestra, the chamber group, the opera, the dance . . .” (Baumol and Bowen 1965,500).

The Law and Economics of Artists' Inalienable Rights

Abstract During the past decade there has been a substantial revival of interest among economists and political scientists in the study of institutional structures in the public sector. Of critical importance is the design of rules governing accountability and the delegation of authority. The funding of culture through public arts councils provides an interesting set of problems, because of the necessary reliance on expert judgment in selecting what to fund, and the usually vague mission of arts councils. This paper examines the political oversight of the Canada Council for the Arts and the (US) National Endowment for the Arts, suggesting that the different fortunes of the two agencies may be at least partially a result of the parliamentary system of government in Canada and the presidential system and division of powers in the US.

Transaction cost politics and the National Endowment for the Arts

This paper provides an overview of the economic analysis of inalienability, here defined in the narrow sense of restrictions on whether and how ownership of a right may be transferred to someone else. It then considers three aspects of the laws relating to artists and their works that are subject to some inalienability restrictions: droit de suite, moralrights, and unconstitutional conditions. It is suggested that inalienability restrictions designed to achieve distributional goals are probably misguided, and that although in theory one could derive some efficiency arguments for inalienability rules, in practice it is not clear that they apply to these examples from the laws relating to artists.

Social Context and Voting Over Taxes: Evidence from a Referendum in Alabama

Abstract Cultural economists have traditionally justified public funding of the arts through the claim that there are “market failures,” particularly externalities, in the consumption of the arts. But when we try to explain the wide variation in funding for the United States’ federal arts funding agency, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), we find that something more than the usual economists’ model is required, since it is not evident that fluctuation in the degree of market failure has been sufficiently large to provide an explanation of the NEAs history. This paper advocates a transaction cost approach to thinking about the economics and politics of arts funding. It finds that the transaction cost politics method of looking at the “delegation problem”—the decision by elected legislators to provide bureaucratic agencies with a certain amount of decision-making discretion—gives a fruitful means of explaining the declining fortunes of the NEA through the 1990s, as well as changes to its administrative structure.

Understanding State Government Appropriations for the Arts: 1976-1999

The authors investigate the impact of racial diversity and segregation on white voter support for a comprehensive, progressive tax reform, focusing on a 2003 referendum held in Alabama, which if approved would have raised substantial additional revenues for public education and at the same time greatly increased the progressivity of the tax system. The authors use Kings method of ecological inference to obtain estimates of white and black support for the referendum proposal and then attempt to explain the variance across counties in white voter support. Findings show that the degree of racial segregation, rather than the proportion of blacks in a given county, is most critical in predicting support for the referendum among whites at the county level.

Hybrid Organizations in the Arts: A Cautionary View

Using panel data analysis, we examine the relative importance of citizen and government characteristics on a highly discretionary and volatile budget item: state appropriations to arts agencies. Despite the unimportance of arts spending to most citizens, changes in arts spending appear to reflect citizen desires. Spending rises with per capita income, state revenues, and citizen political and social liberalism, but characteristics of state legislatures do not significantly affect spending.