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 theEuropean Economic Area (EEA). The legal framework of the EU/EEArequires Member States to pursue evidence-based policy. The current scopingreview focuses on what kind of policy research is available on gambling in theEuropean context to support evidence-based policy. We searched three scien-tific databases for research literature on gambling regulation and policy in theEuropean context. The final sample consists of 88 papers. We analysed the cor-pus with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency mapping, and, narra-tively, by applying the policy cycle phases (agenda-setting, formulation,adoption, implementation, and evaluation). Overall, the results show thatgambling policy research is a growing field in Europe, and the policy cycledescribes the available literature amply. The largest part of the existingresearch concerns the evaluation phase, while the formulation and implemen-tation phases are under-represented. The findings are discussed in terms of themain outcomes, as well as in terms of the gaps in the existing research.