In my wider anthropological research, I argue that current political gambling is primarily a story about financial capture: the technologically led financialization of politics that repackages political engagement into an extractive pseudo-investment. In this short piece I instead draw attention to the fact political gambling is part of an extraordinary form of state capture. Fuelled by the ideology of political gambling as a pure form of intellectual brinksmanship, gambling interests gain access to the state via individuals on their way into power and profit from that continued association, which has assisted in making political activity resemble the gambling industry. I want to show both how the idea of politics as gambling disciplines the political imagination and how gambling interests corrupt politics.

Take for instance one-term Conservative Party MP Aaron Bell, a man who in 2024 was reprimanded for sexual misconduct against a member of his staff in a bar inside Parliament. When I met him at Portcullis House in Westminster in 2022, Bell argued politicians should think through gambling to achieve their ends.

"[Coming from the gambling industry] I try to bring into politics the same discipline… Because when I worked in the betting industry, I literally wrote the models that worked out the pricing for, mostly sports events. I did the political betting on the side. I set the odds for that and that’s a very different skill, but I worked out the models that worked out the chances of someone winning the next set in a tennis match, or whatever else it might be. And I think what it does, working in that industry gives you the discipline to think probabilistically about things and often politics is reduced to black or white, you must follow this policy or you do this and this will work… And I think it is a very useful discipline to think about the range of outcomes that might happen and about the chance of a policy working, those sort of things. … You could look at the Spring Statement and say, well, Rishi’s done this, he has done this. What’s the chance this is going to make a meaningful difference when it interacts with world oil prices or whatever and from a political perspective, what’s the chance that that will be seen as an adequate response to the cost-of-living crisis that we are going through at the moment. So I think, and obviously, you know, any decision, but particularly a financial decision, is all about balancing, you know, you haven’t got unlimited resources, so you need to work out a portfolio of responses that maximises whatever it is you are trying to maximise, whether it is policy success or whether it is electoral success, and the way you do that is by thinking how likely things are to be successful and if you work on the basis that this either will or won’t be successful, I don’t think that’s a very sensible way to proceed, I think you need to think in probability terms."

I found these thoughts entirely commonplace, permeating both UK and US politics. A creature of Washington DC, I will call him Kevin, agreed to an interview on condition that his name was not used and his material unattributed, but he had a leading role in developing polling techniques and in advocacy within one of the two major political parties. Kevin was messianic about political gambling as a ‘positive social good’, insisting the practice be called prediction markets or forecasting rather than gambling because political gambling is not dependent upon chance. He had been successful in political gambling using multiple accounts on PredictIt, a US based platform that restricts the amount an account can bet on a single market. Kevin knew a lot of political professionals trading on politics, many of whom have greater access to inside information than he does, and they are trading on endorsements that are yet to come out. Kevin, like many connected to politics and US prediction markets, claimed that they had unique and valuable insights into how politics should be played tactically based on the probabilistic forecasting techniques they had trained themselves in through gambling.

In the politics of Western democracies, it has become a truism to say that the public is disengaged from politics. The notion of ‘zombie democracy’ was coined by anthropologist Insa Koch to describe the idea that democracy lives on as a category that governs our thinking without really reflecting the contemporary milieux. The big question around election time is whether a party or politician can reach those masses through attributes such as authenticity, charisma, populism, with a policy agenda that appeals, or a slogan that cuts through. And yet, Koch observed, many of those disaffected people see politicians and engaged voters as the zombies, those lacking connection to community and place, and just the idea of connecting to politics is seen as buying out of local community struggle and betraying their humanity.

Following Koch’s disaffected interlocutors’ ideas, we could say that those who are deeply invested in politics, in playing the game of politics and perceived as removing themselves from the community, exist as a dislocated, calculating, even inhuman subculture. And yet as social scientists we know that humans are unable to escape from society or culture, that even the most instrumental approach to life exists as a community with shared values, expectations and rules. In my research on political gamblers and their intersection with politics, I find that a gambling approach to politics is part of the culture of present-day politics in the UK and US.

In the parlance of politicians and political operatives, a gambling approach to politics presents as a refinement of thinking into a sharp, incisive, probabilistic mode, capable of navigating the uncertain world of politics armed with the weapon of foresight generated by the cauldron of political gambling. For advocates of gambling, wagering is considered an ‘honest’ demonstration of skill because punters thoughts are revealed in their bets and the contest is between those opinions. Thus, by these political operators’ own admission, politics and political gambling are intwined. But I maintain that the resemblance between gambling and politics goes beyond this self-serving narrative, encompassing greater complexity and with it a tilted field. Political gambling as a social phenomenon is considerably more culturally embedded and subject of cultural bias than the image of cold-hearted calculation, so the relation between politics and political gambling also takes on that form.

One attribute of the politicians who bet on politics that I had confirmed by many people, was that on constituency betting (i.e. gambling on who would win individual parliamentary constituencies during a general election) Liberal Democrats (the third national party in the UK) are particularly active, and profitable. Bell said, “You can never beat all the Lib Dems, because Lib Dems are really into constituency betting and they know where they are targeting and that is often under the radar.”

The revolving door and rolling benefits politicians receive contrasts to the professed ‘honesty’ of gambling, revealing it to be a fantasy belied by a board that is stacked against players, whether or not the house takes an edge on a particular game. For example, how honest is it that in 2016 regular political gambler and MP Sir Philip Davies reportedly had his account restrictions lifted by Ladbrokes so that he could pursue a ‘professional strategy’ while professional gamblers and profitable political gamblers meanwhile go to enormous lengths to prevent their accounts being limited or shut down? Davies last notable act before leaving Parliament was betting £8,000 that he would lose his seat, softening his landing. Reports of his bet arose during what was known as the ‘political betting scandal’ during the 2024 UK General Election. The scandal was sparked by the revelation that given advance warning that Rishi Sunak would announce a surprise General Election, Craig Williams MP and a host of other Conservative Party insiders each bet on those dates, often at odds of 5/1. Police who provided security to the Prime Minister were then found to have gambled on the election date. Some allegations claim individual politicians placed dozens of bets across different bookies, a tactic commonly employed to maximise the amount of money one can bet without raising alarm bells among the bookies and causing bookies to shorten the odds they were offering.

Instead of cold-hearted ruthless politicians treating their careers as professional gamblers, we see politicians trying to manipulate the markets to favour them, sometimes in transparent and ham-handed ways. We see politicians cosy up to the gambling industry to receive favourable treatment and a future payoff. We see politicians using insider information for small-scale marginal gains that come at the cost of their careers. But we also see an army of strategists and wunderkinds who are clever with numbers and who treat political gambling as a powerful strategic tool, legitimising the idea that political gambling among politicians is more than the grubby interest of people heady on their own power and keen to spice up their jobs.

In the end, political careers of gambling-aligned politicians do resemble gambling, not as an idealised practice, a noble wager between principled opponents, but as an industry. After all, Aaron Bell and Sir Philip Davies’ close ties to gambling, their use of the revolving door, and the close correlation between their advocacy and the hospitality and favouritism they received from the industry may not mirror gambling as a noble and honest contest of minds so much as it resembles the mutual enrichment of the industry and those charged with regulating it.