A scoping review of gambling policy research in Europe

In Europe, gambling policy is conditioned by different administrative levels, including national authorities and the EU, as well as institutions of the European Economic Area (EEA). The legal framework of the EU/EEA requires Member States to pursue evidence-based policy. The current scoping review focuses on what kind of policy research is available on gambling in the European context to support evidence-based policy. We searched three scientific databases for research literature on gambling regulation and policy in the European context. The final sample consists of 88 papers. We analysed the corpus with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency mapping, and, narratively, by applying the policy cycle phases (agenda-setting, formulation, adoption, implementation, and evaluation). Overall, the results show that gambling policy research is a growing field in Europe, and the policy cycle describes the available literature amply. The largest part of the existing research concerns the evaluation phase, while the formulation and implementation phases are under-represented. The findings are discussed in terms of the main outcomes, as well as in terms of the gaps in the existing research.