The Cultural Policy Center

The Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary research center dedicated to informing policies that affect the arts, humanities and cultural heritage. It is a joint initiative of the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Since 1999, the Cultural Policy Center has served as an incubator for new ways of understanding arts and culture, what they do, and how they are informed and affected by a range of policies in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

We address this breadth of study by drawing upon the extraordinary expertise and resources of the University of Chicago and building bridges with researchers and cultural sector leaders across the globe. Demographers, survey design specialists, and quantitative sociologists contribute statistical rigor to our efforts. Legal scholars, economists, and philosophers bring conceptual clarity. Historians, cultural critics, and anthropologists provide contextual and interpretative depth. These collaborations result in groundbreaking work on state cultural policy, the arts workforce, arts censorship, cultural amenities, economic impact analyses, and contingent valuation methodology.