Clean Campaigns: How to Promote Candidate Codes of Conduct

NCL Staff

The National Civic League and the Institute for Global Ethics recently published, "Clean Campaigns: How to Promote Candidate Codes of Conduct." The report, released as a field guide, was written to help those interested in clean and positive campaigns motivate their candidates to voluntarily sign codes of conduct and pledge to refrain from negative, attack based campaigning.

The publication is partially the result of last year’s joint effort between the National Civic League and the Institute for Global Ethics (IGE) to bring campaign codes of conduct to local races in Ohio. Benefiting from the lessons learned during this and several independent IGE projects, the field guide helps community activists through the specifics of how and why they should work to change the level of discourse they experience during election season.

Working to combat citizen cynicism is not new to IGE. In 1997, they began a nationwide effort to promote voluntary candidate-endorsed codes of campaign ethics as a way to address the problems associated with candidates relying on attack advertising. As part of their work, IGE surveys have indicated that roughly 80 percent of voters believe negative, attack oriented campaigns are unethical; damage our democracy; and lower voter turnout. By a three to-one margin, voters feel campaigns have gotten worse in terms of ethics and values in the last 20 years. While most politicians would reluctantly agree with this trend, they often claim that negative campaigning can provide the edge necessary to win a campaign. Yet, according to a meta-analysis completed in 1997 by scholars Richard Lau and Lee Sigelman, "[t]here is simply no reason to believe that negative political advertisements are any more likely than positive ads to produce the results their sponsors desire—if anything, the opposite" (Read more about the project at www.campaignconduct.org).

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