This book examines one aspect of the evolution of legal gambling in late modernity.¹ Gambling for profit has waxed and waned since antiquity. What has changed over the past four decades is the corporatization of legal gambling and ever increasing stimulation of gambling markets by states, capital, and charitable organizations.² Historically, these processes have developed unevenly across time and space. Indeed, western countries have legalized gambling for profit at different times with varying structural configurations. As shown at table 1.1, most western countries had legal lotteries before 1970, eight countries permitted casinos, and nine had legal gaming machines outside casinos(GMOCs)....

In this chapter, I explore the emergence of casinos, gaming machines outside of casinos (GMOCs), and lotteries among 23 western industrial countries. I want to demonstrate that welfare regime type has influenced the emergence of gambling for profit in late modernity, and that federal neo-liberal states have tended to legalize and organize gambling differently than the other regimes. For this reason, I chose Australia, Canada, and the United States as case studies to lay out my central arguments. Accordingly, this chapter offers a broad glimpse of gambling among the welfare regimes, and I provide a detailed analysis of federal states...

In this chapter, I examine the pattern of commercial casino adoption that began in the 1970s in context of the analytical framework presented in Chapter 1. The main argument is that gambling for profit emerges through a dynamic and fluid process that encompasses political, economic, social, and cultural conditions bound in historical contingency. The impetus is most often economic, but the decision to attempt adoption and the success of the endeavour will lay in individual motives, combined with the extent to which actors can be mobilized to support or oppose legal gambling activities. This means that the sociocultural environment and...

Chapter 2 demonstrated that historical contingency shaped the political economies of western states producing variations in gambling policies and practices. Broadly speaking, the neo-liberal Anglo countries have moved further into risk governance of gambling than the European welfare regimes. In Chapter 3, I examined differences in casino adoption among Australia, Canada, and the United States. Overall, Australia adopted commercial casinos earlier than did either Canada or the United States, arguably because the political-economic and sociocultural conditions were more conducive. Casino development has also been uneven in each country, the result of diverse economic pressures and public response.

In this chapter,...

The liberalization of gambling for profit has expanded across western countries in a jagged fashion over the past four decades, the result of different practices shaped by historically contingent preconditions. Many scholars have accounted for this expansion using political-economic explanations: politicians and economic elites promoted legal gambling as a response to economic crises that threatened state legitimacy while facilitating capital accumulation. Others have highlighted sociocultural characteristics that made the introduction of legal gambling opportunities possible. Both approaches have provided valuable insight into gambling in late modernity, but, as McMillen (1996a) points out, they are presented as universal, tend to be...