The Korea Local Administration Review

Since the late 1990s, many local Korean governments have claimed toadvocate the “City of Culture” as their main municipal vision. This paperquestions whether this shift in municipal vision has really caused the policypriorities of local governments to change, as would ultimately be reflected inbudget changes for their cultural policies. To answer this question, the presentstudy aims to investigate the causal relationship between the municipalgovernment’s cultural vision and the budgeted expenditures for culturalpolicies. This study also tries to control a variety of demographic, socioeconomic,political, institutional, and geographical aspects in the regressionmodels, in order to not only identify the determinants of the budget formunicipal cultural policies, but also to capture precisely the causal effect of the“municipal cultural vision”. Consequently, the research has found that the vision,or goal, towards a “City of Culture” appears to have very little effect on thebudget size for cultural policies, whereas other elements, such as demographiccomposition, economic situation, and geographical characteristics are likely to beable to influence such budget changes. This result seems to indicate theexistence of a certain limitation that the local Korean authorities have struggledwith, which perhaps can be interpreted to mean that local Korean governmentstend to adopt the position that “production and consumption” o r “supply anddemand” is the deciding factor with respect to the cultural policies as well.