Arts of the States in Crisis: Revisiting Determinants of State-Level Appropriations to Arts Agencies

Abstract

Clearly, much has happened to the state of public coffers and their ability to finance the arts in the past decade. This study extends Noonan (2007) into the next decade and the “Great Recession” that hit the U.S. (and world) economy–with state public finances severely exposed to the downward economic shock. The emphasis of the empirical analysis here is answering a twofold question: how well have past models predicted the past decade of funding patterns, and how have the funding determinants shifted in recent years. While the previous work found that some predictable patterns (e.g., there is much momentum in funding, demographics and partisan politics matter), there was insufficient evidence to back the claims that SAAs suffer disproportionately during times of fiscal stress. Further, political culture has changed substantially in the US in recent decades. From today's vantage, we can observe how well the older models predict the changes actually experienced. This comparison shows that the severe budget cuts experienced in the wake of the recession were to be expected, but there are some interesting shortcomings in the previous understanding, which points to a shift in the determinants of public arts funding in the U.S.