The perpetual crisis of cultural policy – or how better to understand cultural policy legitimacy

In this paper, we argue that cultural policy is not in crisis due to lack of empirical evidence demonstrating the effects of democratization ambitions on user statistics. Instead of evaluating the legitimacy of democratizing cultural policies on its abilities to transform non-users of culture into users of culture, we argue that we instead need to study how state funded arts organizations actively work towards being perceived by the public as open and inclusive spaces, in order to understand the role of democratizing cultural policies for cultural policy legitimacy. Further, we argue that actual democratization of culture is not that important for the legitimacy of cultural politicians in office, as the legitimacy of their role as a cultural politician mainly depends on how well cultural sector actors perceive that the politician in charge sees them and grants them the respect they feel they deserve. Democratization of culture is then mostly referred to as an ambition signaling inclusive democratic values when legitimizing cultural policy to actors not involved in the politics of the cultural sector. Even though cultural policy tools may not be suited to change user statistics, we conclude that democratization of culture will most likely remain an important part of the legitimation work of cultural politicians and cultural managers, as it is important for them to communicate to society an authentic ambition to work towards broadening access to arenas of high/elite culture, in order to maintain legitimacy among citizens.