Stakeholders influence the ability of organisations to achieve their aims, but little work has been carried out into understanding the stakeholder concept as applied to political actors. This paper first discusses the contextual nature of stakeholders using normative and strategic, and broad and narrow dimensions, integrating these 2 dimensions with power asymmetries and reciprocity.This paper then argues that a broad stakeholder concept for the political marketing context reconciles strategic and normative issues, as whilst successful interactions with specific stakeholders are necessary to achieve completed political exchanges of value, all stakeholders that exist in democratic societies have some form of moral claim to representation. As each political exchange of value consists of 3 consecutive interactions, the direct stakeholders in 1 interaction become indirect stakeholders in subsequent interactions. As each interaction occurs within a "marketplace" context, interactions in previous marketplace(s) together with expectations of the impact on future marketplace(s) influence current decision-making. Finally, it is proposed that in the political marketing context, the stakeholder concept can be defined as "context-specific agents that directly or indirectly influence or are influenced by the political actor."