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Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

The European Association of Political Consultants (EAPC) is the Europe-wide professional body for political-consulting practitioners. Its Lisbon Declaration is the industry self-regulation framework, and its annual congresses are the venue where European campaign practitioners discuss professional ethics.

Body

EAPC’s Lisbon Declaration (adopted 1995) is the industry’s voluntary ethics framework: members pledge to refuse work for clients who do not abide by democratic norms, to refuse work that constitutes racist or xenophobic advocacy, to refuse work for clients whose financial sources are undisclosed, and to refuse work that targets individual public figures’ private lives. The Declaration is a working example of a professional-body-issued self-regulation code. [source: eapc]

EAPC membership is open to individual political consultants; the association organises congresses, publishes industry directories, and conducts conferences on European campaign practice (digital, polling, field, advertising). The professional-development framing provides the consulting-ethics frame for the wiki’s political-consulting-ethics concept. [source: eapc]

The Lisbon Declaration has not been amended substantially since its 1995 adoption; the industry’s professional-ethics evolution lags both the rise of computational targeting and the rise of cross-border disinformation campaigns. The EAPC and IAPC’s respective self-regulation frameworks are the closest things the political-consulting profession has to a code. [source: eapc]

Use it for

Citing the European political-consulting profession’s self-regulation framework; arguing for tighter professional-ethics norms in political consulting; designing a professional-association ethics curriculum for a domestic political-consulting context.

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