Abstract
The paper aims to explore the drivers of immigrants’ participation to cultural and leisure activities in host countries. First, we discuss how the main analytical approaches on cultural participation can be extended to incorporate factors specific to migrants’ characteristics and behaviour, namely cultural traits or proximity to the native population’s culture and the level of integration in the host society. Secondly, we estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to investigate migrants’ propensity and frequency to engage in cultural and leisure activities using data of a special survey on Income and Living conditions (2011–2012) on foreign households in Italy. Italy represents an interesting case because it is a recent immigration country, making the analysis particularly suitable for studying the behaviour of first-generation immigrants. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for standard individual predictors, cultural participation is significantly and primary driven by the process of acculturation which take place during the staying in the host country. Conversely, we find only a partial or weak evidence of the effect of both personal cultural capital and of the heterogeneity in migrants’ cultural traits on variation in participation rates.
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Notes
Cavalli Sforza (2001) and the more recent economic literature on culture and institutions define the inter-generational transmission mechanism as vertical, mainly occurring through parents–offspring relationship in the household, while the intra-generational one as horizontal cultural transmission, based on social interactions and exposures to others’ traits and values.
The survey is the Indagine statistica multiscopo sulle famiglie con stranieri. Condizione e Integrazione Sociale dei Cittadini Stranieri. Anno 2011–2012. The sample was drawn using a two-stage selection design with municipalities and families. Municipalities are stratified by region and municipal typology and selected with probability proportional to the resident foreign population. To ensure that different nationalities are properly represented in the sample of municipalities extracted in the first stage, a balanced selection of the municipalities was made on the basis of the nationalities present. The data are available upon request from ISTAT (https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/10825).
It is relevant to notice that the one category of cultural participation that is not taken into account in the survey is attendance to museums and art exhibitions.
Although a direct comparison of participation rates between immigrants and Italians is out of the scope of this article, it is worth noticing that participation of immigrants tends to be lower than those of natives for cinema, theatre and sport events but displays similar rates for concerts and dancing venues.
The education variables consider the highest level of education achieved, regardless whether it has been obtained in Italy or in the country of origin (or another country). A deeper inspection of the data indicates that most of the education titles reported by respondents have been obtained outside Italy, a pattern in line with countries whose migration phenomenon is recent.
The dummy variables refer to the following categories: unemployed (baseline), high-qualified employee, low-qualified employee, self-employed, household, student and retired. The category of high-qualified employee includes Managers, Professionals, Technicians, Clerks, Services and sales. The category of low-qualified employee includes craft and agricultural workers, plant and machine operators, elementary occupations.
As income is unobserved, this variable can also partly capture the economic situation in the household of the migrant.
The others are Poland, Albania, Ukraine, Moldova, Macedonia, Centre Europe, Other Europe, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, North Africa, South-Centre Africa, East-Africa, West-Africa, China, Philippines, East-Asia, India, Bangladesh, South-Centre Asia, Ecuador, Peru, South-Centre America, Ecuador.
Melitz and Toubal (2014) have constructed two separate measures of language proximity which they label LP1 and LP2. The former calculates linguistic proximities on the basis of the Ethnologue classification of language trees between trees, branches and sub-branches. The latter, more sophisticated according to the authors, is based on analysing lexical similarities between lists of up to 200 words of two different languages. We have adopted this latter measure. As the measure is constructed as a dyadic variable between two countries, for the observations for which we have the immigrant’s macro-area of origin instead of the country (such as East Africa), we calculated an unweighted mean proximity index based on the values of the countries in the macro-area.
In Italy the Metropolitan Areas are Roma, Torino, Milano, Venezia, Genova, Bologna, Firenze, Bari, Napoli, Reggio Calabria, Cagliari, Catania, Messina and Palermo.
In our case and for all the cultural activities considered, measures of fit confirm ZIOP as a more suitable choice relative to a standard ordered probit model.
The two selected activities also partly differ for the level of involvement with the Italian language. In Italy, foreign movies shown at cinemas are all dubbed. For music concerts, the question in the survey does not allow assessing the relevance of the language (e.g. differentiating between classical/instrumental music concerts and popular music concerts) or which language is used.
The only countertrend effect is that of the years since migration on theatre non-participation (Fig. 7 in appendix). This result depends on an non-significant estimated coefficient (see Table 3) and is not confirmed by the predictive margins calculated on the estimates that use alternative measures of identity and cultural proximity.
The effect of national groups on predictive probabilities for the other cultural activities is presented in Appendix, Fig. 8.
As linguistic proximity is constructed on the language of national groups, some groups displaying higher rates of cultural participation in specific cultural activities are from countries whose language is relatively more distant from the Italian language.
For example, the International Social Survey Program has conducted only one survey in 2007 on leisure time and sports covering only 33 countries all over the world. For European countries, Eurobarometer has published a cultural participation survey only on 2013.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Tally Katz-Gerro, Maurizio Ferrera, Marco Martiniello and Giovanna Segre for encouraging this research project. We would like also to thank for insightful comments and suggestions the participants to the 2019 European Workshop of Applied Cultural Economics, to the Workshop “Migrant Consumption of Cultural Goods: Hypotheses and Evidence” organized in Turin within the 2019 Jean Monnet Module Migration in Europe, to the 2019 CefES Annual Conference on European Studies, to the panel DIVCULT of the 2019 IMISCOE annual conference in Malmo and to the on line Italian Association of Economists annual conference 2020.
Funding
The study was funded by Fondazione CRT (Grant Project: Il ruolo dei consumi culturali degli immigrati nei processi di integrazione–number 2018.2286).
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Appendix
Appendix
See Figs. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Tables 4, 5, 6 and 7
Predictive margins with 95% CI by integration variables for selected cultural activities
Predictive margins by integration variables for selected cultural activities
Predictive margins with 95% CI by national groups for selected cultural activities
Predictive margins by national groups for selected cultural activities
Predictive margins with 95% CI by religion for selected cultural activities
Predictive margins with 95% CI by linguistic proximity for selected cultural activities
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Bertacchini, E., Venturini, A. & Zotti, R. Drivers of cultural participation of immigrants: evidence from an Italian survey. J Cult Econ 46, 57–100 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-020-09405-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-020-09405-0