For most citizens, political ethics are usually an issue of low salience. Thinking about what standards of conduct should guide politicians’ behaviour is not a daily preoccupation. Yet citizens potentially form ethical judgements or update their beliefs about politicians’ integrity every time they read or hear about political activity. Moreover, reports of alleged misconduct appear in the news nearly every week. They are virtually impossible to avoid. In Britain, from the mid-1990s, when media coverage of various misdeeds and indiscretions fuelled concerns about Conservative ‘sleaze’, through Tony Blair’s decade in power, which included the spectacle of a sitting prime minister being interviewed by police about his knowledge of possible party funding irregularities, to the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009, a succession of scandals have afflicted almost every part of the political system. The prominence of politicians’ misconduct waxes and wanes, but is rarely off the agenda for long.

This chapter provides an overview of political ethics and misconduct in Britain up to the 2010 general election, when the last of our surveys was fielded. Although our study is concerned with improving our understanding of citizens’ perceptions of politicians’ integrity, it is important to locate these attitudes against the backdrop of the complex and gradually changing ethical landscape inhabited by politicians. This landscape has normative, behavioural and institutional features. It includes those commonly held ideas, beliefs and values that structure and give meaning to what politicians regard as ethical. It includes politicians’ actual conduct, including behaviour that may well constitute misconduct. And it includes those rules and procedures that are put in place to maintain high ethical standards of conduct. Together, these features can be expected to shape citizens’ understandings of political ethics and perceptions of the nature and extent of misconduct in political life. More importantly, they also constitute a set of ideas, practices and behaviours that may or may not correspond to the public’s expectations, but which, if they do diverge too much from expectations, may be a source of dissatisfaction with political institutions and even democratic politics.