Cultural Infrastructure and Reading Inequality

This dataset provides a regional, place-based compilation linking annual book-reading participation to socioeconomic context and cultural infrastructure across Spain’s 17 autonomous communities. It integrates six data blocks: (1) annual reading participation (share of respondents who read at least one book in the previous year), (2) official public library statistics (e.g., libraries per 100,000 inhabitants and registered users), (3) regional income indicators (net income per person), (4) local public expenditure on public libraries, (5) directory-based counts of municipal public libraries, and (6) independent bookshop density. The merged master file contains 17 territorial units and 152 harmonized variables capturing reading outcomes, infrastructure provision and partial uptake, public funding proxies, and market-based access points. The dataset is designed for exploratory territorial analysis and descriptive modeling (e.g., correlations and parsimonious regressions) rather than causal inference, given the small number of regional observations and the use of aggregated indicators. It supports research on cultural participation, territorial inequality, and cultural policy evaluation, and it enables comparative diagnostics of how socioeconomic gradients relate to reading outcomes relative to standard infrastructure measures. Source documentation and variable definitions are provided in accompanying metadata files.