The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (259 page)

See
ticket-splitting
.

 
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The systematic sacking of one's opponent's appointees, and substitution by appointees of one's own, on winning an election. The spoils system was recognized as a formal part of American federal government throughout the nineteenth century. It continues in a diluted form today with the presumption that the top appointed federal offices are vacated on a change of administration. The term is also applied to the systematic filling of low-level posts by one's own appointees as a reward for political loyalty such as helping in an election. Critics of the proliferation of
quangos
and (since 1979) privatized agencies in British government argue that they give the incumbent party an opportunity to exercise a similar spoils system on behalf of their political supporters.

 
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In the British Labour Party the trade unions have since the earliest days sponsored a number of candidates by meeting a proportion of election and office expenses. In the past sponsorship was important in enabling workingclass candidates to enter Parliament. Nowadays many sponsored candidates have no real connection with the sponsoring union, although they may undertake to liaise with the union. Sponsorship does not permit a union to dictate how a candidate or MP should behave.
Some trades unions and pressure groups such as the police, farmers’, and teachers’ unions sponsor MPs from all the main parties but do not contribute to campaigning activities.
PBy 

 
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Sport is concerned with contests of skill and prowess, primarily, though not exclusively, athletic prowess. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century ‘sport’ in the English language referred primarily to field sports; games were not included. However, many contemporary reference works on sport now exclude not only all of the field sports, but also many of the most popular games, including the cue games, card games, board games, and electronic games. Official definitions, such as those used by the Sports Council, are similarly exclusive. Thus, ‘sport’ can be said to have a shifting and contested meaning.
In its modern form, sport descends from a plethora of traditional contests held in rural societies. But whereas those traditional contests were loosely regulated by convention and local in their nature and enthusiasm, the modern form is typically subject to precise international regulation and brought to the attention of a mass audience through the electronic media. An influential stage of transition occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain: the élite, ‘public’ schools were the primary developers of the new, disciplined, and well-defined sports and games which were spread throughout the world by British commerce and the British Empire.
From its first conception modern sport had moral and political aims. It was conceived by such educators as Thomas Arnold of Rugby as a necessary means of training young men in loyalty, teamwork, and discipline while dissipating their excessive energy. These values were seen to be as relevant to an urban-industrial society as to a school and of particular value in the running of an empire. In the United States, English games like baseball and rugby developed separate American forms from the 1870s, highly trained and specialized, with an important role in both the educational system and the growing industrial conurbations.
The politics of sport has been subject to a mythical belief that sport had ‘nothing to do with politics’. This myth was driven by the idealism, the purity of aspiration, which many people sought from sport and it functioned to help keep sport off the political agenda. But the reality was that modern sport was conceived, essentially, as a form of political socialization and the institution has contained political struggles at its core and lent itself to a number of political functions. The principal contest internal to sport has been between an amateur-élite ethos and a professional-commercial ethos. To the amateurs, sport was both recreation and moral training; these functions must necessarily be corrupted by the development of specialized professionalism. To the commercializers, sport offered a myriad of possibilities for making incomes and profits. The struggle between these ethoses was a long one, with many battles and compromises on the way. Some sports, including rugby union and the Olympic Games, lasted much longer than most in resisting commercial professionalism, but, given the power of television, the defeat of amateurism was, by the late twentieth century, something of a rout.
It would be too simplistic to suggest that sport has functioned, or been successfully used, as an ‘opiate of the people’ as Leon Trotsky suggested it was (in
Where Is Britain Going
, 1926). Many politicians have tried to associate with sport and sporting success, though with mixed results. One consistent theme has been the development and preservation of national identities. Even in the early development of sport in the British Isles, the establishment of separate national competitions and teams in the most popular sports (and separate sports in Ireland) was important in redefining the relationship between the United Kingdom and its component nations. The Soviet Union after 1945 devoted enormous resources to success in Olympic sport in order to convince people of the virtues of its form of society. The fostering of and identification with sporting success have been an important element of attempts by post-colonial African states to meld multitribal societies into modern nations. The success of these enterprises was partial at best, but there can be no question that sport has had a distinctive part to play in modern politics.
LA 

 
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Two main senses, one more collective, the other more individual. In the first sense, one who has a stake in a business or a policy. In its modern usage, the word is deliberately contrasted with shareholder. A shareholder has a particular kind of stake, namely a share in capital. A stakeholder's stake may be labour, or land, or a consumer interest in the business or policy. Political writers who talk of a ‘stakeholder society’ therefore mean one in which interests over and above shareholders are effectively represented. The less well-defined the interest, the harder it is to see how the stake is to be claimed or protected. Workers' stake in a firm may be acknowledged in a supervisory board as in Germany and to a limited extent in the UK; but how are consumers' stakes to be claimed? Therefore, although in the early years of
New Labour
, there was much talk of a stakeholder society, it is hard to point to institutions that have changed as a consequence of such rhetoric.
In the second sense, the term is increasingly used in connection with new forms of social policy based on individualized assets/accounts (‘stakes’). In contemporary academic debate, this use of the term is exemplified by Bruce Ackerman's and Anne Alstott's book,
The Stakeholder Society
(1999), which argues that each citizen (of the USA) should receive an $80,000 grant as of right on maturity. The New Labour government's proposals for a Child Trust Fund, while much more modest than the policy Ackerman-Alstott propose, can be seen as a clear example of a stakeholding policy in this second sense. Another example was the invention of ‘Stakeholder Pensions’ under the first Blair government: these were designed to be personal pensions for middle income people not in an employer's pension scheme.
IM