Arts of the States in Crisis: Revisiting Determinants of State-Level Appropriations to Arts Agencies

Public funding for the arts in the United States occupies an important and controversial niche in the country's cultural sector. Yet while direct arts funding from the government has long been a minor share of resources invested in the arts, it has served as a lightning rod for political controversy, a litmus test for the health of the sector, and a priority-setter and pivotal supporter for particular arts projects and programs. Noonan (2007) offers a detailed look at how fiscal, institutional, and demographic factors influence state-level appropriations to state arts agencies (SAAs) in the United States. His dynamic panel data statistical model relies on data spanning 1969 – 2002. By ending the analysis in 2002, however, the analysis misses one of the most dramatic, challenging, and high-profile eras of public arts funding in the United States. This analysis revisits the earlier study and updates the data through 2011. The past 10 years bring some trends previously not experienced in the data, including the Great Recession (2007 – 2009) and declines in appropriations and household income. 2001 marked the all-time peak of funding for SAAs in real terms, and concluding the time series shortly after that point meant that the data only contained what was a familiar story for public arts expenditures around the world: seemingly continually rising funding levels for 30 years. Extending the time series out to 2011 reveals the pattern of nearly monotonic increases in annual appropriations has been supplemented by declines in the real budgets of SAAs in nine out of the past 11 years.