The sport political System of Spain

Ninja Putzmann (ed.)
German Sport University Cologne, 2017
379 pages

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The study contributes to the scientific area of sport politics and to the area of country studies and the analysis of systems. New empirical findings for Spain are combined with theoretical concepts of the system theory and further approaches from the political sciences. The overall aim of this study is to characterise the sport-political system from a political science‘s perspective. The focus is on the relationship between sport and politics on the national level. Thus, actors, outputs and processes of change are the central objects of investigation. For this study, the high performance sport and the grassroots sport form the relevant sport policies.

The sport-related articles in the Spanish constitution and the Spanish sports act constitute the formal framework for interactions of the sport-political actors. Within the development and implementation of outputs, the principle of consent and cooperation is applied. The national sport administration initiates, dominates and regulates the decision- making processes. Thereby, it works closely together with the sports federations. The administration has a high potential to intervene in the organisation of sport. This is broadly accepted by the sport organisations and federations, and partly even wanted. The sport system as well as the political system have an interest in an intensive interrelationship. The state subsidies and promotion programmes enable the high performance sport to operate internationally competitive. The state uses the achieved medals and results for a positive public image and for branding. The mutual provision of external performances relieves each of the systems. There is no such interrelationship between the state and grassroots sport which is loosely organised – in contrast to the institutionalised high performance sport. A further characteristic of the Spanish sport-political system is the indecisiveness of the distribution of competences between the national and the regional level.

Following the central theoretical and empirical results, the study proposes a model that categorises forms of state intervention and the resulting forms of feedback of the organised sport.