<p>The extent to which codes of ethics (and ethics more generally) are influenced by social, political and cultural factors have been discussed in the literature for some time. We can find several direct examples of this in codes themselves, with some explicit about the need to interpret their content in light of broader social and political forces. Despite these discussions however, we have not yet been able to quantify these differences or the factors that influence codes. Utilising natural language processing, this study sought to explore this, examining whether similarities between codes of ethics were related to a range of socio-political factors. Data for this study came from 202 medical and nursing codes of ethics from around the world. To explore associations, a number of common metrics were utilised, including macro-economic, political, cultural and healthcare related variables. To compare each document, cosine similarity was calculated (on the whole document text and TF-IDF) providing two measures of similarity between document pairs. The other variables included for modelling were also transformed into pairs, categorising them or calculating differences between scores. Generalised linear mixed models revealed that sharing a profession (medical or nursing) and language had the strongest associations with code similarity. Colonial history (i.e. countries with a coloniser-colonised relationship) and greater similarities between GDP and individualism/collectivism were also associated with greater similarity. The pattern when it came to political and healthcare system variables was less clear, showing no clear and consistent association across models. We discuss these findings in light of the broader literature and theoretical debates within bioethics.</p>