Cultural Participation and Social Inequality in the Digital Age: A Multilevel Cross-National Analysis in Europe

Cultural participation is considered as a necessary element of social equity, able to generate positive effects on individual opportunities and quality of life as a whole. Adopting a cross-national perspective, this study considers both traditional and new cultural practices deriving from the rise of new technologies, aiming at analyse how social inequality affects cultural participation in the European countries in the digital age. The main specific goals are the following: (1) elaboration of a synthetic index of Cultural Participation at European level; (2) identification of the determinants of participation at both individual and country level; (3) test of the interactions between some country features and individual characteristics, indicators of social differences, to verify their effects on cultural participation. The empirical analysis is based on 26,053 respondents aged 15 years and over, collected by the Special Eurobarometer survey n. 399 containing comparable data on cultural participation. To take into account country characteristics, some variables have been taken from other statistical sources (Eurostat). Data analysis resorted to Nonlinear Principal Component Analysis and multilevel regression models.