Cultural Indicators of Internet Sports Betting Policy

Abstract

The academic study of online gambling is a relatively new field. The first occurrence of money being wagered using the Internet dates back only 16 years, and research in the field has only been actively conducted for about the past decade (Romney, 1995). Today, there are thousands of online gambling sites, served by even more online gambling skins. Politically, there is interest in this growth—it is considered everything from a source of tax revenue to the scourge of society (Bernhard & Abarbanel, 2011). The nature of the online medium has also been a cause for debate among jurisdictions seeking to legislate the activity. The Internet transcends territorial lines, and wager transactions can easily be conducted between persons located in differing regulatory schemes. In response to increasing rates of gambling on the Internet, government policy has been appearing. This policy response tends to take one of four general forms—actively allow, actively prohibit, passively allow, or passively prohibit (Policy Department, 2008). Those governments that actively allow or prohibit have passed and/or imposed regulations which deal explicitly with Internet gambling, and those which passively allow or prohibit have not enacted any legislation which deals specifically with the Internet medium (Policy Department, 2008). Passive policies also include those jurisdictions that have chosen to apply any pre-existing gaming regulation, generally based on land-based gambling laws. Betting on sports is a unique case of gambling. Sports and sports betting are and have been intimately intertwined for thousands of years, and in many cultures it can be difficult to determine where one begins and the other ends. Gambling can be viewed as a threat to the integrity of sport, which has long stood as a bastion of honor and strength in a community and society (Binde, 2005). As such, sports betting may be treated with trepidation politically, due to cultural views on sport. To measure the cultural and sociological factors which contribute to each country/jurisdiction's unique make-up, Geert Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions (Hofstede, 2009) are widely accepted by many academic disciplines as a means of quantifying the very qualitative cultural characteristics of differing countries. The purpose of this study is to identify social and cultural commonalities in countries with similar approaches to Internet sports betting operations policy. Following this, the author hopes to help predict gambling policy choices for countries that have not yet established policy regarding online sports betting operations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)