This article explores practices of political clientelism in a native village in Mexico City during recent elections (2006, 2012), aiming to create more conceptual clarity and to demonstrate the usefulness of ethnographic approaches. Seen from the clients' and the brokers' perspective, political clientelism and vote buying are two different practices, carried out in different ways, with different degrees of legitimacy. The problem-solving network studied here bridges the gap between the citizen and the state, while the political operators hope to be rewarded with public employment. In this case, one candidate-patron changed parties a few months before the 2012 elections, and the electoral statistics provide indications of the numerical effectiveness of his clientelist network. Multiparty competition, instead of undermining clientelist practices, appears to "democratize" them.T he return of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) to presidential power in 2012, apparently aided by television campaigns and possibly massive vote buying (for example, with debit cards for a supermarket chain), feeds into the debate about vote buying and political clientelism in Mexico. The former is illegal and, in Acopilco, the community studied in this article, mostly seen as illegitimate. The latter, however, is considered legitimate, at least among those who constitute the demand side of the bargain. In this community, the candidate for delegation chief in 2012 won his position clearly because of his long-term clientelist engagement.The candidate, Adrián, had been involved for several years with the PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática); however, when the PRD leaders appointed another candidate a few months before the 2012 election, Adrián approached the PRI/Verde coalition and was appointed its candidate. The PRI coalition had received only 16 percent of the votes in Acopilco in the previous local elections (2009), but Adrián garnered 46 percent for the PRI in 2012; the PRI presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, obtained 37 percent in Acopilco. Adrián won the Delegation of Cuajimalpa for the PRI, as the only one out of 16 delegations in the Federal District in 2012. 1 It is important to point out that these votes were not the result of coercion, threats, or fear, as is often argued in the literature about political clientelism. The

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This article explores and argues the suitability of ethnographic methods, primarily participant observation, in the research of politics, and in the construction of concepts for theory building. The argument is sustained by using a case study of a network of political clientelism and some instances of vote-buying in a native village in Mexico City. The author maintains that long-term participant observation is particularly well suited to discover puzzles and incongruities, which invite abductive reasoning, and allow for unplanned findings and new insights. Issues of legitimacy, moral universes and life-worlds, as well as tacit knowledge, local discourses and silences, are researchable with this methodological approach. The author suggests the study of politics would benefit from more scholars employing these methods.