How often to a museum? Motivations matter

Some recent contributions to the literature on cultural participation have highlighted the presence of previously disregarded motivations and the necessity of a refinement of the measure of cultural capital used in empirical analyses. However, the question of how motivation affects the frequency of cultural consumption has seldom been raised in a rigorous empirical setting. Here we use data collected in 2012 at Vittoriale, the most popular museum of the shores of lake Garda, a renowned Italian touristic destination, to investigate the issue. We apply Zero Inflated Poisson, in order to assess the influence of a set of selected variables on the number of museums visited in the last 12 months. We find that cultural capital, proxied by literacy, social status, proximity of supply and time constraints affect the number of visits to museums and arts exhibitions. We also find that the variables capturing a possible motivation effect, obtained as a result of a multiple correspondence analysis, are significant. We draw some new policy implications for museum managers.