This short paper provides a rough and very tentative outline of a research study aiming at tracing the interplay between different kinds of knowledge production about cultural policy, on the one hand, and cultural policy practice, on the other, in the specific setting of the Swedish political-administrative system. Over time, knowledge production about cultural policy has become increasingly diversified, most notably through the establishment of a specific national government agency devoted only to the assessment of policy measures in relation to policy goals. In addition to academic researchers, a new kind of expert has thus been introduced in the negotiation over which knowledge claims that gain legitimacy amongst cultural policy stakeholders. The paper briefly discusses this development based on a selection of previous research on knowledge production in and about cultural policy, as well as suggestions on how to methodologically explore this turn of events. 

This article explores the broad and undefined research field of the social impact of the arts. The effects of art and culture are often used as justification for public funding, but the research on these interventions and their effects is unclear. Using a co-word analysis of over 10,000 articles published between 1990 and 2020, we examined the characteristics of the field as we have operationalised it through our searches. We found that since 2015 this research field has expanded and consists of different epistemologies and methodologies, summarised in largely overlapping subfields belonging to the social sciences, humanities, arts education, and arts and health/therapy. In formal or informal learning settings, studies of theatre/drama as an intervention to enhance skills, well-being, or knowledge among children are most common in our corpus. A study of the research front through the bibliographic coupling of the most cited articles in the corpus confirmed the co-word analysis and revealed new themes that together form the ground for insight into research on the social impact of the arts. This article can therefore inform discussions on the social value of culture and the arts. 

In this article, we present the analysis of a state-of-the-art review made as part of the Horizon 2020 EU-funded project AMASS (Acting on the Margins: Arts as SocialSculpture), which aims to address challenges of marginalisation in Europe through arts-based interventions. This study analyses researched-based materials on the social impact of the arts, theoretically underpinned by an understanding of the role of the arts in conjunction with the problematisation of social marginalisation. We found three ways to understand the social impact of the arts in the material; as a participatory means to agency and empowerment, identity and expression, and learning and development. These categories are related to analytically derived positions of marginalisation as predominantly structural- or more individual-based. Art is conceived of as a way to bridge these positions through an understanding of its educational qualities. These categories offer a fruitful but also potentially limited role of the arts in society.

In both Finland and Sweden, decentralisation has traditionally been an essential cultural policy aim. This article explores how, by pursuing decentralisation, the regional jurisdictions have been presented with more possibilities to fulfil their purposes and in this way, gain legitimacy in cultural policy. Based on the analysis of political, legal, and administrative documents, three main periods of regional decentralisation in cultural policies are identified: regions as vehicles of welfare policy, regionalisation, and competitive regions. In both countries, national governments have promoted the regional level’s agency, and in doing so, potential institutional change in cultural policy. However, the increase of the regional level’s role has been limited by the countries’ strongly institutionalised cultural policy systems.

In this paper, we explore the argument that research on Swedish public cultural policy has not contributed to providing an academically sound and critical basis for assessing basic failures in Swedish cultural policy. The aim of our paper is to tentatively trace a limited selection of explanations for why this is the case and our contribution is thus perhaps best classified as belonging to the meta-study of cultural policy research. We conclude that a basic challenge for the cultural policy research field is its tendency to reproduce normative assumptions generated by cultural policy stakeholders. Research on Swedish cultural policy thus runs the risk of integrating research with the policy sector, rather than provide an autonomous knowledge basis. We argue that one important remedy would be comparative studies, between cultural policies in different countries as well as between different policy fields.