The democratic value of participation in swedish cultural policy

Abstract

Through an exploration of Swedish cultural policy, this article analyses how policy legitimates its support for the arts and culture, and how "participation" is made meaningful in this process, to discuss how different understandings of culture and participation relate to changing notions of democratic governance in culture. The article discusses how an overarching discourse of culture as good, and therefore an interest in and responsibility for policy, can be understood as two discourses: 1) culture is good as it enables good things and 2) culture is good as it prevents bad things. These two discourses rest on different logics and "fixate" the concept of participation in different ways but are constructed as if they were compatible. The meaning of democratic governance in culture is also differently interpreted in the two discourses-as either protection of autonomy, equality in access to culture, and participation as taking part, labelled a corporatist democracy, or as guaranteeing sustainable societies at risk, and participation as an equal possibility to influence, labelled populist democracy. This break in discourse is interpreted as a sign of diminishing legitimacy of a corporatist discourse of democracy where experts have had the power to decide the content of cultural policy. The article partakes in a discussion on the role of participation and democracy in cultural policy.