ABSTRACT
Governments may decide that it is in the public interest to intervene in culture by providing culture in direct and indirect ways. The four instruments most commonly used by government to provide culture include: direct public provision, subsidy, grantmaking, and indirect support through tax expenditure. Here, each instrument will be described and considered in terms of its administrative characteristics and its strengths and weakness as a tool for providing culture. Only in the case of public provision does government in the U.S. act in a relatively independent way to provide culture; other forms of provision depend upon what Lester Salamon, a political scientist and scholar of the nonprofit sector, terms third-party government, “in which government shares a substantial degree of its discretion over the spending of public funds and the exercise of public authority with third party implementers” (1987: 37). In the United States, there is reticence to address public needs directly through government, especially through the federal government. This has meant that there is a great deal of third-party government in the U.S., creating a “dense mosaic of policy tools, many of them placing public agencies in complex, interdependent relationships with a host of third-party partners” (Salamon 2002: 3). In the U.S., repugnance for government interference in culture amplifies these tendencies; much U.S. cultural policy is accomplished through third-party government.
