Compromising the public good? Civil society as beneficiary of gambling revenue

ABSTRACT

Profits from legal gambling are often channelled to good causes. This system embeds the predicament of whether citizens’ potentially problematic gambling activities should be a source of funding for the public good. In this article, this dilemma is unfolded by the receivers of public grants that stem from gambling revenues. A total of twenty-three representatives of Civil Society Organizations were interviewed as beneficiaries of the Finnish state-owned gambling monopolies. The article illustrates explicit dependencies and hidden ethical dilemmas, suggesting that CSOs may have limited possibilities of making ethically consistent decisions in view of the origin of their funding.

KEYWORDS:

• Gambling
• civil society
• key informant interviews
• public good
• public grant

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Academy of Finland (Project: Gambling Policy in European Welfare Regimes), the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies, and the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. We would like to thank Dr. Riikka Perälä and Maija Majamäki for their help with the interviews.

Disclosure Statement

Egerer's and Hellman's salary is covered by a project that functions through a cooperation contract between their research group and the state operated National Institute of Welfare and Health (THL). Funding bodies have not had any influence on this publication or its results.

ORCID

Michael Dieter Egerer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3983-4489

Notes

1. Community organization is not a term that would be typically used for the CSOs and third sector actors in a Nordic context. Adams’ framework is the one of New Zealand. In the English speaking world – especially Australia, the USA, and the UK – where most gambling research has been conducted so far, Civil Society plays another role in the overall system of responsibilities. In the Nordic welfare countries the municipality and the state hold main responsibility in service provision resembling a common good channelled in Adam's concept of ‘communities’.

2. The revenues of the Finnish tote game organizer Fintoto were used until recently to promote horse breeding and equestrian sports. The Åland Islands, a small autonomous region in Finland, has its own gambling monopoly PAF (Ålands Penningautomatförening). Neither PAF nor Fintoto are included in this study.

3. The numbers were calculated based on data available on the web-pages of the Funding Centre for Social Welfare and Health Organisations (Sosiaali-ja terveysjärjestöjen avustuskeskus, 2018).

4. The total number of organizations funded in 2016 is calculated based on data available on the webpages of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture (Ministry of Education and Culture, 2018a, 2018b).

5. All quotes translated by the authors.

6. Gambling revenues from gambling machines come to a considerable extent from problem gamblers (e.g. Orford, Wardle, & Griffiths, 2013; Salonen, Kontto, Alho, & Castren, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The project is funded from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health within the objectives of the §52 Appropriation of the Lotteries Act. The money originally stems from the gambling monopoly. The monopoly has no influence on how the money is distributed by the Ministry. Kankainen has a research grant from the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies, which resources are also based on the Lotteries Act. The gambling monopoly has no influence on who receives the grants, what the goal of the project is, nor the publication of results.