Active Participation in European Cultural Policy

A critical reading of the Sector Blueprint and Culture Compass

#6 COUNTING CULTURE: HOW EVIDENCE SHAPES PARTICIPATION POLICY

By Giorgio Bacchiega

The relationship between evidence and cultural policy is less neutral than it appears. When surveys and statistical instruments are designed to translate participation into quantifiable terms across different contexts, they inevitably shape what kinds of responses come to seem appropriate. This is because the frameworks through which data are read are already in place before the numbers are analysed, influencing what those numbers are taken to show. Where policy depends on what can be measured, then, how participation is counted matters not only because it determines what is visible, but because it structures how that visibility is interpreted.

THE MEASUREMENT PUZZLE
In the Culture Compass, data are primarily drawn from Eurobarometer 562 “Europeans’ attitudes towards Culture” (2025) and used to establish an informed baseline for intervention. As a long-standing instrument developed to capture comparable public opinions across Member States, Eurobarometer expresses cultural participation in terms that can travel across different contexts, condensing the richness of engagement into categories that only partially reflect the diversity of the activities involved. However, when data are interpreted as an objective account, the implicit definition of participation they carry becomes the definition that policy works with.

The Sector Blueprint starts from a different premise. Rather than taking existing data as a neutral foundation, it questions their adequacy, pointing to the limits of current measurement systems in capturing the complexity of cultural participation. The issue, here, is not only how many people participate, but how participation is experienced within different contexts. Data are therefore approached as a cultural construction that shapes what policy is able to see. The proposal to develop the concept of Cultural Footprints signals an attempt to move toward a more relational understanding of participation, designed to capture wider societal impacts. The call for improved and integrated data systems reflects the same recognition: existing surveys capture only a partial view of participation.

This divergence in orientation becomes visible in how each framework positions data itself: in the Compass, data define the problem to be addressed, while in the Blueprint, they become part of the problem to be examined.

THE SURVEY DESIGN EFFECT
At the surface level, Eurobarometer data appear to offer a clear picture: 49% of Europeans report having engaged in artistic activities within the past year, an increase of 12 points compared to the previous 2013 survey. This figure provides a point of departure for policy and is likely to serve as a reference point for advocacy in the cultural sector as a straightforward indicator of cultural vitality. Yet its meaning ultimately depends on the depth of interpretation, as it gathers in the same category forms of engagement that differ substantially in their nature, their social settings, and the degree of agency they involve, with implications that can lead policymaking in misleading directions.

The first indication of such a compression appears when respondents are asked about barriers, where 26% cite lack of time as the main reason for not participating in cultural activities or attending cultural events. The question aggregates active engagement and attendance without clarifying whether participation is understood as something people fail to access as audiences or something they wish to pursue as agents, making the meaning of this figure ambiguous. Read alongside the fact that nearly half of respondents report having taken part in artistic activities, the picture that emerges suggests that a substantial share of Europeans are not only potential audiences but already engaged with culture as practitioners. Taken together, these findings indicate a dual policy challenge: expanding access while sustaining existing forms of active engagement.

In practice, however, in the absence of finer distinctions, the Compass’s interpretation defaults to a framework that reads participation through the lens of audience-oriented forms. As a result, practitioners disappear, absorbed into a solution logic that interprets barriers exclusively as problems of access to receptive activities, while the ecosystem that sustains active engagement remains outside the scope of policy attention. This becomes evident in the treatment of young people introduced in the previous article, where high levels of active participation among groups such as 15–24-year-olds and students (68% and 74% respectively) are met with responses that prioritise access-oriented approaches, at the expense of active participation.

THE POLICY FEEDBACK LOOP
When participation is measured without distinctions, policy responses tend to treat different forms of engagement as equivalent and to prioritise those that the framework is already equipped to address. This ambiguity is even more significant when cultural participation is understood as a vehicle for developing democratic and social capacities. Here, the absence of specific indicators produces a critical blind spot that goes beyond mere partial understandings of participation, generating instead outright distortions whose effects become clearer as analysis moves closer to the gap between the outcomes policy seeks to achieve and the statistical construction of participation across its settings, temporalities, and degrees of agency. Measurement systems do not simply reflect participation, but organise its interpretation in ways that can lead to systematically misleading readings of where intervention is actually needed, a dynamic that becomes concrete in the three cases examined next.

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This series is intended as a critical yet constructive contribution to the Culture Compass debate, exploring where active participation challenges existing policy assumptions and where new frameworks may emerge. Future entries will address participation versus access, indicators and measurement, and the place of grassroots practices within European cultural ecosystems.

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Consulta Periferie Milano is a network-centric platform (formally a second-level association of undertakings or association of associations of undertakings) formed by 36 cultural, charity, trade, visual and performing arts organisations, cultural centres and local newspapers active in the peripheries of Milan with the purpose of drawing constant attention and find original solutions to the problems of the multifaceted peripheral landscape of Milan in cooperation with academic, political and societal forces.