The public image and function of gambling provision in Finland: Scrutinizing a policy system

In the beginning of 2017, Finland merged its three monopoly-based gambling companies into a single company. This merger was partly the result of a need to comply with the European Court of Justice Decision concerning the acceptability of a gambling monopoly despite the European free market. Following advances in gambling technology related to Internet gambling and machine design there was a need to prevent inter-monopoly competition in the gambling provision (Ministry of the Interior 2016). The merger was also justified publicly in terms of better mitigation of social and health-related gambling harms.
The PubFunc-project recruits focus roups through a population survey investigating the views that different types of gamblers have of gabling policy in general, and the newest changes in Finnish policies in particular,