Cultural policy in Spain : processes and dialectics

The redistribution of powers concerning cultural policy corresponds to a specific historical trajectory as well as to political and commercial dynamics. Thirty years since the 1978 Constitution, Spain is a quasi-federal state. Their cultural life and policies have expanded and have been decentralized. The redistribution process is a result of the search of effectiveness confronted with the question of the legitimization of power. Legitimacy is a permanent theme of debate as well as a discursive and strategic instrument between institutional actors, and it sheds light on the apparent inconsistencies of the multi-level governance of cultural policies. To study the different aspects of these relationships, the article principally focuses on three areas. The first is an institutional analysis, which allows us to determine the place of each institutional actor within the network of cultural policies as well as the horizontal and vertical interactions. The second is an analysis of the public financing of culture, which permits us to measure the quantitative impact of cultural policies within the centre-periphery dynamic. The third is an analysis of public policies, which allows a comparative approach to the dynamics of the autonomous community regime. The dialectic between differentiation and standardization, a mark of cultural policies modernity in the context of centre-periphery relationships, is a result of the pressure from the main players on the different Spanish cultural and territorial markets. Examples of “good practices” mimicry as well as of “new” pattern models, like the new Arts Council of Catalonia, are used to expose the non-existence of a formal Spanish model of cultural policy, but shows the process of innovation-reply product strategies, and the dialectic between political autonomy and homogenization processes. (Abstract by the author).