Eppur si muove: an evaluation of museum policy reform in Italy

This study evaluates the effectiveness of a novel cultural policy to recover the val- orization function of Italian state museums by increasing managerial autonomy. The policy is part of the Franceschini reform, introduced in 2014, that concerns the governance of cultural institutions and was justified by the severe budget con- straints resulting from economic crisis and a spending review. Given the staggered implementation of the reform across 32 museums that obtained special autonomy, we apply a difference-in-differences strategy that allows to properly investigate the causal effect of the policy reform on museums’ outcome measures of exhibition function, as visitors and revenue from admissions. Our findings robustly support the effectiveness of the cultural policy reform in terms these outcomes. Although we provide some suggestive evidence of the efficacy of museums’ management (through a number of communication and supplementary services), this study suf- fers of the limitations due to the lack of more appropriate measures on how success- ful changes in management have been. However, results aim to offer policy recom- mendations in favor of greater managerial and financial autonomy of state museums that, while preserving their conservation function, can promote the widespread utili- zation of collections ensuring museums’ greater sustainability.