Picture two neighboring towns with similar average incomes. In one, paychecks are spread fairly evenly across households. In the other, a small group earns far more than everyone else. Would residents of these two places attend concerts, plays, and museum exhibitions at the same rate? A new study suggests the answer is no, and that the gap between rich and poor, not just the size of a person’s wallet, helps explain who shows up.
The research, published in the Journal of Cultural Economics, examines how income inequality relates to cultural participation across Italy’s regions. Its central finding is that places with more unequal income distributions tend to show lower levels of in-person cultural activity, and that this pattern holds even after accounting for how much money people actually have.
A question turned on its head
Roberto Cellini and Tiziana Cuccia, both economists at the University of Catania in Italy, set out to reverse a familiar question. Much of the existing research, along with European cultural policy, treats cultural participation as a tool to reduce social divisions. The slogan, as the authors describe it, is that “cultural participation brings people together.” But Cellini and Cuccia wanted to look at the relationship from the other direction: how does the way income is distributed across a society shape who takes part in culture in the first place?
To understand the study, it helps to know about the Gini index, the main tool the researchers used to measure inequality. The Gini index is a single number that captures how evenly income is spread across a population. A value of zero would mean everyone earns exactly the same amount, while a value closer to one would mean income is heavily concentrated among a few. In the Italian data, regional Gini values ranged from about 0.23 in the relatively equal region of Veneto to about 0.36 in Campania.
The authors argue that inequality could dampen cultural engagement through several channels. High inequality can create financial barriers for lower-income groups, who face not just ticket prices but also transportation and time costs. It can concentrate access to good education and early cultural exposure among wealthier families, shaping tastes from a young age. And it can influence the kinds of social networks people form, with cultural activity in unequal places more likely to bond similar people together than to bridge across different groups.
Twenty regions, twelve years
To test these ideas, the researchers built a dataset covering all 20 Italian regions over the years 2011 through 2022, drawing the figures from Italy’s National Institute of Statistics, known as ISTAT. With 20 regions observed across 12 years, the dataset contained 240 observations.
Their main measure of cultural participation, which they call cultural participation outside the home, comes from a national survey. A person aged six or older counts as “active” if, over the previous 12 months, they reported doing at least two of six activities: going to the cinema at least four times, attending the theater, visiting museums or exhibitions, exploring archaeological sites or monuments, attending classical music or opera, or attending other concerts.
The team chose to study regions within one country rather than compare different countries. They reasoned that Italian regions share the same national institutions and education system, which reduces the risk that differences in laws or systems, rather than inequality itself, are driving the results. The authors note that real per capita income across these regions varied widely, from around 17,000 euros in Calabria to more than 40,000 euros in the wealthier north.
To analyze the data, Cellini and Cuccia used a method called two-way fixed effects regression. In plain terms, this approach strips out fixed differences between regions, such as their size or existing cultural infrastructure, and also removes shared yearly shocks that hit all regions at once. The pandemic lockdowns of 2020 through 2022, which legally restricted attendance at public events, are one example of such a shared shock that the method absorbs.
What the numbers showed
Across every version of their analysis, higher inequality was linked to lower cultural participation, and the relationship was statistically significant. As expected, higher income levels were associated with more participation. But the inequality measure held its negative relationship even after the researchers controlled for income, education, labor market conditions, and digital access.
To give a sense of scale, the authors estimate that a one-point rise in the Gini index, such as moving from 0.27 to 0.28, is associated with a drop of roughly half a point in the participation indicator. They describe this as modest but “far from being negligible.”
One result the authors found striking concerns education. In studies based on individual people, education usually emerges as a powerful predictor of cultural engagement. Yet in this regional analysis, once income and the fixed regional and time effects were included, the education variables were not statistically significant. The inequality measure, by contrast, stayed negative and significant throughout.
The study also looked at digital access. The internet might, in theory, either replace live attendance or encourage it. In the Italian data, household internet and broadband access were positively associated with in-person participation, which the authors read as evidence that online and live cultural consumption tend to complement each other rather than compete. Even so, adding these digital measures did not change the negative relationship between inequality and attendance.
Labor market conditions told a related story. The share of young people not in education, employment, or training, known as the NEET rate, was linked to lower cultural participation. This suggests that, in the Italian case, idleness was associated with disengagement rather than with the extra free time that might allow more cultural activity.
Holding up under different tests
The researchers checked their findings in several ways. They ran separate regressions for men and women and found the inequality relationship was similar in both size and direction across genders. They swapped the Gini index for an alternative measure, the ratio of income held by the richest fifth of households compared with the poorest fifth, and the negative relationship persisted, though it was weaker. The authors explain that overall participation reflects the behavior of the whole population, so a measure of overall inequality like the Gini tends to matter more than one focused only on the extremes.
When they broke participation down by activity, the inequality relationship was negative and significant for theater, classical music, pop concerts, and museum visits. The one exception was cinema, where the relationship was negative but not statistically significant. The authors note that income levels exerted a positive influence, which was statistically significant only in the case of cinema.
What it means, and what it does not
For people working in cultural policy, the study offers a note of caution. Cellini and Cuccia argue that simply increasing the supply of cultural events does not automatically broaden who attends. In highly stratified places, they write, expanding offerings without attention to audience diversity risks “benefiting only those already engaged.” The authors interpret their results as evidence that reducing income inequality and widening access are conditions for culture to serve as a tool for social cohesion, rather than something that follows automatically from cultural spending alone.
A few caveats are worth keeping in mind. This is an observational study using regional averages, not an experiment, so it points to associations rather than proving that inequality directly causes lower attendance. The data also describe Italian regions over a specific decade, and while the authors believe the relationship likely has broader relevance, they do not claim it automatically applies elsewhere. They also acknowledge that the Gini index captures only one dimension of inequality, and they suggest future work could incorporate wealth and broader measures of opportunity beyond income.
