GINI DP 88: The redistributive effect and progressivity of taxes revisited: An International Comparison across the European Union

This article examines inequalities in highbrow cultural participation in 18 countries. It tests whether inequalities in such participation occur because of the status conferred by consumption of high culture, or whether they are more a result of differences in cognitive competencies. Inequalities are represented by respondents’ education. By filtering out the effects of cognitive abilities, measured by a person’s literacy skills, we obtain a net measure of the status motives for cultural behavior. Our analysis demonstrates that the net (i.e., status) effect of education on cultural participation is reduced in societies with greater educational expansion and intergenerational educational mobility. This is in line with the status explanation, which holds that exclusionary boundaries between educational groups become less rigid when there are more high-educated individuals in a society and when these originate more frequently from lower social backgrounds. In contrast, the relation between a person’s cognitive skills and their cultural participation is unaffected by distributional variation in education, as the cognitive theory predicts.