Factores que limitan la participación cultural. Una mirada desde la economía de la cultura

In their seminal work, Baumol and Bowen (1996) ask why cultural participation is found in a reduced segment of the total population. In this paper, the different answers offered to this question are tracked, based on a careful review of theoretical and empirical literature from the perspective of cultural economics. The main conclusion is that cultural participation is determined jointly by typical variables in rational expectation models (rational addiction and learning by consuming) and also by a network of factors linked more to the institutional and technological aspects that condition the social and economic valuation of cultural participation. This article contributes to the literature of cultural economics by integrating the traditional viewpoint of understanding cultural participation determinants with factors that this article calls "structural," which have received little emphasis in terms of placing them at the center of the cultural policy debate to encourage participation.