POL42480

Moral Agency in Election Campaigns (ELECT) is a five-year research programme funded by the Eruopean Research Council (2023-2028), led by Joseph Lacey as Principal Investigator. Contemporary Election Campaigns is a unique module that will be embedded in the themes, methods and problematics of the ELECT project. Thematically, module participants will be introduced to key concepts like moral agency, moral psychology and social and democratic norms. They will also be steeped in the empirical literature concerning the new era of election campaigning – defined by developments in big data and new media and the emergence of novel electoral challengers. In doing so, participants will become familiar with the core strategies and tools available to election campaigns and how those interact with the media and wider citizenry. Methodologically, module participants will be introduced to the “grounded normative theory” framework, which aims to combine normative political theory with empirical research. The empirical methods of the ELECT project and their design – surveys, interviews, focus groups and discourse analysis – will be explored. The core problematics will revolve around how to best study the moral agency of the key actors that constitute the lifeblood of election campaigns: candidates, campaign professionals, journalists and citizens.