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Determinants of cultural and popular celebration attendance: the case study of Seville Spring Fiestas

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Abstract

The Spring Fiestas in Seville (Spain) (SFS) are the most important cultural events in the city each year. The present paper pursues two aims. The first is to characterize the SFS as a new prototype of a complex cultural good that expresses the link between the people and the place in which they live based on material and immaterial cultural heritage represented through popular celebrations. The second goal is to conduct an empirical analysis of the determinants that shape attendance intensity by estimating a zero-truncated count data model using a unique dataset of attendees at the SFS in 2009. Findings indicate that attendance is strongly associated with variables reflecting knowledge, institutional links, past experiences, and the perceived external benefits generated by the existence of the SFS. The article contributes to the literature by exploring participation in popular celebrations, a field of inquiry that to date is extremely limited in cultural economics.

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Notes

  1. The name SFS first appeared at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when the Seville City Hall began to publish posters on which the two events were featured as a single unit inviting people to participate in both. The oldest of the celebrations is Holy Week, which dates back to the sixteenth century, specifically to 1521. The April Fair began in 1847, originally as a commercial agricultural fair, similar to those held in other parts of Spain.

  2. Much has been written about Holy Week, adopting varying approaches. Moreno (1999, 2001) and Fernández de Paz (2006) from an anthropological perspective are particularly interesting.

  3. Entomologically hermandad is Germanic (blood brother). In Andalusia, a distinction is made between brotherhoods, which can be made up of associations of the faithful set-up to perform certain acts of piety or charity, and brotherhoods called cofradías which are set up to increase public worship. There are currently 59 cofradías (henceforth brotherhoods as it is a more general term) participating in the Holy Week processions.

  4. According to information provided by the Spring Fiestas Office of the Town Hall (La Delegación de Fiestas Mayores del Ayuntamiento de Sevilla), in 2008, there were 1,047 marquees, 27 of which were family run with a sole owner, 499 family run with shared ownership, 311 belonging to different private entities, 190 private members clubs (peñas)), one municipal, six local neighbourhood marquees, and 13 local services marquees.

  5. SFS as cultural goods generate external benefits such as their aesthetic value or spiritual value, more so in the case of the Holy Week celebration than the April Fair, their social value, serving as a link and reaffirming the feeling of identity associated with Seville and its cultural life, their historic value, the symbolic value mentioned previously, and finally their authenticity value.

  6. Given the characteristics of the SFS, demographic variables such as race were not considered as they were not felt to be relevant.

  7. The appendix lists the main questions that were used in the survey to estimate the models. The full questionnaires and dataset are available to researchers upon request from the authors.

  8. The sample was drawn up following a proportional stratified design in terms of origin (local and non-local) and event (Holy Week and April Fair) based on information from the Census Bureau for the estimation of local residents and from the city of Seville Yearly Statistics to obtain data of non-local visitors. In this latter source, we found information about the number of visitors to Seville in 2008 during the same period as the SFS took place.

  9. This number of days includes the day that an individual is interviewed.

  10. A mean difference t-test reveals that the difference between Holy Week and April Fair attendance intensity (t= 3.7182) is significant (p< 0.01).

  11. We have run a Wald test for the overall significance of the three age variables, results showing that age is statistically significant at the level of 0.05 (p< 0.01, χ2 (3) = 10.34).

  12. According to a Wald test for the overall significance of the two educational variables, results show that education is not statistically significant (p >χ2= 0.99, χ2 (2)= 0.02).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Juan Prieto-Rodriguez, Victoria Ateca-Amestoy, Angel Sanz-Lara and Cristina Borra, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. This paper also benefited from comments received at the 1st Workshop on Cultural Economics and Management and the 16th Cultural Economics International Conference. All errors are the sole responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Economic History, Faculty of Economics, University of Seville, Ramón y Cajal 1, 41018, Seville, Spain

    María Luisa Palma & Luis Palma

  2. Department of Economics, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia

    Luis Fernando Aguado

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  1. María Luisa Palma
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  2. Luis Palma
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  3. Luis Fernando Aguado
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Correspondence to María Luisa Palma.

Appendix

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See Table 5.

Table 5 Survey: Spring Fiestas of Seville Attendance
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Palma, M.L., Palma, L. & Aguado, L.F. Determinants of cultural and popular celebration attendance: the case study of Seville Spring Fiestas . J Cult Econ 37, 87–107 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-012-9167-5

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