Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa

Country Experts to assist with the coding of codes of conduct and ethics/disciplinary bodies inside party organisations, willing to contribute to making the largest dataset on ethics self-regulatory measures implemented by representative institutions across the EU democracies.

Ethics and Integrity in Public Life project (ETHICS) is a two-year project, coordinated by Luís de Sousa at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-ULisboa), Portugal and funded by the Foundation Francisco Manuel dos Santos (FFMS). With this survey we will be mapping codes of conduct and ethics/disciplinary bodies inside party organisations across Europe.

Political ethics strengthen the bonds of trust between citizens and their representatives, and therefore matter to the overall quality of democracy. Yet levels of trust in parties remain low, despite all the laws governing the ethical conduct of individual and collective political actors. The overall perception is that most of these regulatory efforts have not been properly designed and enforced. We want to give parties a chance to speak out and show what they have done so far to reduce this credibility deficit and how successful they have been in their intents.

In these times of uncertainty about the future of representative democracy, volunteering a few hours of your time to contribute to a project that seeks to identify best practices to improve ethics management in political life, is also an act of positive citizenship.

Our institutional profiling questionnaire has 24 detailed indicators and is organised in two sections: one focusing on the legal framework; another on the institutional setting. We will be completing a questionnaire per political party with parliamentary seating. Each questionnaire should not take more than an hour to complete. We are only coding parties with parliamentary representation in the 28 Member States (UK included). The coding procedure is documentary and web-based, through the consultation of both party statutes/constitutions and their institutional websites. The project’s default language is English.

The coding is to be carried out during the month of June and to be completed by mid-July the latest.

We are particularly looking for dedicated and committed collaborators with interest in these topics and familiar with party politics and political ethics in a country or set of countries.

Collaborators will be able to use the data for their research endeavours.

Join our team of country experts!

How to apply:

If you are interested in taking part in this project, just send us an e-mail to (ethics@ics.ulisboa.pt) indicating the country or set of countries you would be in grade of coding, and attach a copy of your CV.