// democracy

Source: Public health – The Conversation

Polymarket is now taking bets on municipal elections—its wager on London, Ontario's mayoral race opens a market previously unavailable to financial traders. The mechanism creates a direct incentive: money flows to whoever holds better information about local governance. This introduces two concrete risks. First, it rewards insider knowledge—people with advance sight of candidate positions or council dynamics can profit from that asymmetry. Second, it can push candidates toward perception management over actual delivery, since the market's pricing becomes the measure that moves. The real issue isn't philosophical hand-wringing about democracy. It's structural: when prediction markets become the price signal for political events, they attract the exact information gaps and gaming behaviors they're supposed to resolve.