EXAMINING RATIONALES FOR GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT IN SPORT EVENTS

It is recognised that government involvement in sport events is based on various rationales, and these rationales influence the potential outcomes a city may experience from hosting such an event (Gleeson & Low, 2000; Searle & Bounds, 1999; Veal, 2002). Over the last few decades, the economic potential that sport events offer a city has seen increased government interest and governments have been criticised for neglecting the social outcomes (Carrière & Demazière, 2002; Misener & Mason, 2006; Searle, 2002). Yet there is limited research that has empirically investigated government involvement in sport events. This paper aims to address two main objectives: to develop an understanding of rationales for government involvement in sport events and to understand how these rationales influence subsequent event outcomes. This research addresses these objectives through an analysis of post-event evaluation documents. The research design consisted of two stages. First, a framework is presented through which to examine the rationales for government involvement in sport events. Second, the preliminary findings are presented from the empirical test of the Framework to determine which policy areas have been incorporated and emphasised within the post-event reporting. This research analyses 7 sport events staged in Australia from 1995 to 2007. Findings from this study demonstrate conclusively that event reporting is preoccupied with economic outcomes, with content coverage almost double to that of social outcomes. The implication of this research is that the development of leveraging sport events for social outcomes and evaluating these social outcomes has been limited