The Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to both revisit some fundamental questions for comparative cultural policy analysis as well as to ask new ones. A vantage point for this study is an aim to look at how different processes of change – long-term and short-term – interact. In particular, we are interested in the changes that are spurred by the pandemic and how this arguably exogenous shock interacts with the more long-term process of general digitalisation.
We ask: Do the different adaptions to Covid-19 confirm, reinforce or challenge existing cultural policy structures in different European countries?
The basic empirical data of the paper consists of systematic overviews of Covid-19 measures directed towards the cultural sector. The primary sources have been press releases, web pages and documents from relevant public entities in the different countries: ministries, ministerial offices, public authorities and arts councils. We have also used a selection of secondary sources for the totality of measures, mainly published reports on Covid-19 measures in different countries (e.g. OECD 2020a, KEA 2020, Berge et al. 2021, IDEA Consult et al. 2021).
