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Abstract
Gambling-for-profit is the legal exploitation of gambling by state, corporate or charitable organisations. In the 1970s western governments began liberalising and deregulating gambling policies to provide revenues for state governments and commercial entities. The outcome has been the corporatisation of lotteries, expansion of casinos and gaming machines outside of casinos (GMOCs) and the stimulation of gambling markets to drive profits. Nevertheless, the emergence of gambling-for-profit in late modernity has not occurred uniformly spatially or temporally. In this thesis I use an historical comparative framework to explore two questions. First, what factors led to the dramatic expansion of legal gambling that began in the early 1970s? Second, what enabling and constraining conditions help to account for the variation among and within western states generally, and Australia, Canada and the United States specifically? I begin with an examination of casinos, gaming machines outside of casinos and lotteries in twenty-three advanced industrial countries. The findings suggest that type of welfare regime, polity and degree of centralisation when the country was formed has greatly influenced where and when legal gambling emerged and the forms it has taken. In the remainder of the thesis I pose the question of why Australia, Canada and the United States differ considerably in the timing of adoption and configuration of gambling-for-profit. All three countries took on comparable neoliberal policies and experienced similar economic performance. Yet, for the most part, Australia adopted gambling-for-profit earlier and the United States has lagged behind the other two countries. I conclude that a series of historically contingent political, economic, social and cultural conditions enabled the establishment of gambling-for-profit throughout Australia, and before similar patterns of adoption appeared in Canada and the United States. I further assert that universalistic explanations of gambling-for-profit cannot be sustained since differing circumstances bound in historical narrative and conjuncture influence its development.
