Cultural policy, politicians and the logic of appropriateness

Abstract

In countries where cultural policy is organized as a separate political-administrative sector, one will find politicians who devote large parts of their time to issues of cultural policy and for whom this engagement becomes an identity. What characterizes these ‘cultural politicians’ and what can the study of these actors teach us about the workings of the state in the domain of cultural policy? In this article, we illuminate these questions on the basis of interviews with Norwegian cultural politicians while using the theory on the logic of appropriateness in institutionalized settings as an analytic framework. More specifically, we focus on cultural politicians’ situational awareness, the practices in which they engage, and the roles they take on as political actors. In all these respects, cultural politicians are defined by the high intensity of their personal interchanges with actors in cultural life, which shape the terms for how they operate as political actors. When viewed from this perspective, we argue, cultural policy appears less as a dictate that flows from the state and ‘down’ onto cultural life and more as an uncertain outcome of processes of negotiation and reciprocal exchange between political executives and actors in cultural life.

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