Introduction

In his seminal historical analysis of Dutch cultural policy, Roel Pots (2010) concludes that the Cultural Policy Act (CPA) codifies the roles of the central actors in the policy system: the government, professionals from the cultural sector and private initiatives. The Act puts the government in the driver's seat of the policy system, initiating debates on cultural policy every four years. Professionals were cast as advisors to the government; at the national level, this became the role of the Council for Culture (Raad voor Cultuur). Private initiatives, which were very prominent in Dutch cultural policy before the Second World War, were reduced to the role of boards of cultural institutions. Although these boards tend to have a major influence, their impact is limited because of the advent of professional managers of cultural institutions and strict regulations of their responsibilities as a result of cultural governance. This chapter takes a sociological perspective on the question of how the political system influences the cultural system, by looking at the underlying value orientations of cultural policies and expert advice. To put it more cynically, it investigates to what extent political values inform actual subsidy allocations.

As indicated in the introduction to this volume, the CPA has focused Dutch cultural policy on quality and diversity as the central objectives, quite overtly keeping its distance from any directives affecting the content of art and the cultural offering. The Act regulates the role of professionals as advisors on matters of quality in particular. This implies that politicians themselves do not meddle in subsidy allocation decisions, that is, they do not decide on allocations to individual institutions. Rather, they follow the advice of the Council for Culture. However, this does not mean that politics takes a ‘neutral’ stance towards the cultural sector. Two developments since 1993 have profoundly affected Dutch cultural policy. The first is the advent of New Public Management (NPM). In and of itself, the CPA is a clear example of NPM, a business-like approach to public administration that has favoured increasingly more detailed requirements to gain funding. This trend is visible in other parts of Europe as well, such as the UK (Belfiore 2004) and Scandinavia (Lindqvist 2007, 2008), and outside Europe, for example, in Chile (De Cea 2008).