Cultural participation beyond the individual: How national socioeconomic and cultural modernization shapes the link between social position and participation

This study explores individual and country-level differences in cultural participation across Europe, using a most-different-systems design and the 2008 debt crisis as a quasi-experimental treatment. We identified distinct patterns of highbrow (six within-country patterns and three between-country clusters) and lowbrow (four patterns and three clusters) cultural participation by analyzing Eurobarometer, European Values Study, and World Bank data with multilevel latent class regression modeling. Results show that in socioeconomically and culturally modernized countries, an individual’s social position has less impact on cultural participation. In addition, these countries experienced a less-pronounced negative effect from the 2008 debt crisis on cultural participation.