Joseph Lacey is Associate Professor of Political Theory at University College Dublin. He is about to embark on a five-year project looking at the moral agency of participants in elections. That's politicians, special advisers, journalists and so on. But it's also you and me: people who engage with political messaging, perhaps take some interest in what's going on behind the scenes and, ultimately, vote in elections. In this episode Joseph talks about the questions he's interested in, his plans for the research, what's distinctive about the method he's going to use, and what he hopes to get out of it. 

Here are some readings suggested by Joseph as good and relevant to the topic:

Beckman, Arthur. 2018. ‘Political Marketing and Intellectual Autonomy: Political Marketing & Intellectual Autonomy’. Journal of Political Philosophy 26(1): 24–46.

Beerbohm, Eric. 2016. ‘The Ethics of Electioneering’. Journal of Political Philosophy 24(4): 381–405.

Green, Jeffrey. 2010. The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Lipsitz, Keena. 2004. ‘Democratic Theory and Political Campaigns’. Journal of Political Philosophy 12(2): 163–89.

Scammell, Margaret. 2014. Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Book your place at our public event with Gavin Esler, "Dead Cats, Strategic Lying and Truth Decay", here.

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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