Talk by Gunnar Otte & Dave Balzer, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

The panel study “Cultural Education and Cultural Participation in Germany” is one of the few databases worldwide that can track the stability and change of cultural preferences and cultural participation on an individual basis over time and across major artistic domains such as music, film, literature, and the performing as well as visual arts. Data have so far been collected for three panel waves in 2018, 2021 and 2025 from a random sample of German-speaking individuals aged 15 years and over living in private households in Germany. This presentation provides an overview of the panel study’s theoretical and methodological foundations and offers descriptive insights into key aspects of cultural participation in Germany. These include the size and socially stratified composition of art audiences, the prevalence of creative activities in the population, and the life-course dynamics of musical preferences. Furthermore, we demonstrate the influence of primary and secondary socialization, personal resources, and contextual opportunities on concert attendance using cross-sectional analysis and fixed-effects panel regressions. The survey was further enriched by several experimental modules designed to explore the social structuring of preferences in greater depth. We present one such module, inspired by new experimental aesthetics. Participants evaluated short song excerpts varying in their degree of prototypicality, allowing us to investigate whether more complex and less conventional compositional practices are more strongly preferred by individuals with higher levels of musical competence and education.