Moral Agency in Election Campaigns

Project Information

ELECT

Grant agreement ID: 101076805

DOI

10.3030/101076805

EC signature date 6 February 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 998,75

EU contribution

€ 1 499 998,75

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ELECT (Moral Agency in Election Campaigns)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ELECT falls within the methodological framework of “grounded normative theory”. It combines normative democratic theory with a mixed-methods and comparative research design to investigate the moral agency of key stakeholders involved in contemporary election campaigns: candidates, campaign professionals, political journalists and citizens. The moral agency of electoral stakeholders becomes a subject of concern when they are confronted with normatively charged situations involving motivations to behave in ways that undermine democratic norms or political trust.

The context in which electoral stakeholders exercise their moral agency has been changing, presenting them with new normative challenges relating to their respective electoral conduct. Recent changes include the strategic and communicative possibilities provided by big data and new media and the evolving competitive landscape relating to the emergence of new electoral challengers. Existing research on the tensions between contemporary election campaigns and democracy and political trust has primarily taken campaign outputs as its objects of study. Far less studied are the moral dimensions of the inputs concerning the role that the attitudes, beliefs and motivations of stakeholders play in influencing their conduct and how their moral decision-making is affected by institutions and regulations. Neglect of this input perspective leaves major knowledge gaps that limits our ability to accurately diagnose normative problems with campaigning and prescribe effective solutions.

ELECT will attempt to fill these gaps by exploring the moral agency of electoral stakeholders in four countries that have been subject to recent disruptions in the campaign context, namely Germany, Italy, the UK and the US. Empirical data will be gathered using surveys, elite interviews and citizen focus groups. Diagnostic and prescriptive analyses based on this data will employ state of the art methods in normative democratic theory.

ELECT poses five original research questions designed to investigate the moral agency of electoral stakeholders and their significance for democratic norms and political trust.

How do the stakeholders experience their moral agency in the contemporary campaign context and how does this influence their conduct?

What are the main determinants shaping the moral agency of electoral stakeholders?

What is the relationship between moral agency, stakeholder conduct and political trust?

Under what circumstances are the stakeholders most likely to contribute to or undermine democratic norms and political trust?

What remedies are available to normatively enhance the contemporary campaign context?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In Year One, we dedicated ourselves to two main activities, the development of a set of literature reviews and the development of our survey design. For the first task, the research team distributed labour to cover the following topics covering a) democratic theory b) adversarial ethics c) theories and typologies of political trust d) parties and campaigns e) political representation f) media systems and political-media interactions g) political marketing h) affective polarisation and i) first-hand accounts of campaigns and political experience by the key actors in the study (candidates, campaign professionals and journalists). While a broad literature was consulted for each topic, we paid special attention to empirical studies that pertained to our four case studies. Because some topics were so broad, they needed to be broken down into multiple sub-categories. In the end, we arrived at 25 review articles of approximately 10,000 words each, providing the team with a common knowledge base that has fed into our empirical research design and will continue to inform our research outputs going forward.

For the second task of year one, we first defined the “democratic norms” we wished to test in our survey and explored all survey articles that have studied these norms in some way, detailing the research design of each, how prompts were developed and identifying gaps in the literature.

In Year Two, we focused on three main activities. First, we developed our survey and, after several iterations, launched it in month 17 of the project. Second, we developed our interview questions and fieldwork strategies and, after several iterations, began our in-country fieldwork also in month 17 of the project. After seven months, we collected 253 interviews total across all countries. Third, we made progress in developing two (of four) of our planned survey papers.

In Year 3, to date, our focus has been on a) completing all four survey papers b) preparing qualitative data for analysis c) developing our codebook to analyse our interviews d) doing handcoding of the interviews and e) developing our focus group plan. All tasks are expected to be fully complete by August 2026.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Since we have mostly been collecting data and have only recently moved on to the analysis stage of both our survey and our interviews, there are just a few results beyond the state of the art to mention at this point.

First, we have demonstrated in our survey that citizens are more deeply affected by violations of democratic discursive norms (like exclusionary or untruthful rhetoric) than institutional norm violations (like challenges to electoral integrity or media freedom) and that citizens are more likely to punish election candidates who violate discursive norms at the ballot box.

Second, we are the first researchers to investigate the extent to which citizens perceive a normative hierarchy between different actor-contexts when it comes to democratic norm violations, demonstrating that citizens have consistent yet differentiated normative expectations of four actor-contexts (candidates in a campaign; legislators in the lower house; journalists in the media; and citizens in a local dispute). Third, we are also the first researchers to systematically investigate citizens’ understanding of their responsibilities during an election campaign. Analysis is still underway, yet provisional findings suggest that citizens tend to be very ambivalent about what they should do in a campaign, yet are quite pessimistic about the extent to which other citizens actually engage in the practices required to to be an informed voter during an election campaign.