Drivers of cultural participation of immigrants: evidence from an Italian survey

The paper aims to explore the drivers of immigrants’ participation to cultural and leisure activities in host countries. First, we discuss how the main analytical approaches on cultural participation can be extended to incorporate factors specific to migrants’ characteristics and behaviour, namely cultural traits or proximity to the native population’s culture and the level of integration in the host society. Secondly, we estimate zero-inflated ordered probit models to investigate migrants’ propensity and frequency to engage in cultural and leisure activities using data of a special survey on Income and Living conditions (2011–2012) on foreign households in Italy. Italy represents an interesting case because it is a recent immigration country, making the analysis particularly suitable for studying the behaviour of first-generation immigrants. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for standard individual predictors, cultural participation is significantly and primary driven by the process of acculturation which take place during the staying in the host country. Conversely, we find only a partial or weak evidence of the effect of both personal cultural capital and of the heterogeneity in migrants’ cultural traits on variation in participation rates.