The Power of Ethnography: A Useful Approach to Researching Politics

Abstract

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.

Making sense of the politics in the climate change loss & damage debate

“…We adopt a political ethnographic sensibility in the way that we approach our interlocutors and our data in our quest to ‘ glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality ’ ( Schatz, 2009 ). While the question of what is ‘political’ about ‘political ethnography’ has tended to be addressed differently across disciplinary divides, there is a relative consensus that most definitions include the struggle to define its jurisdiction, which also characterises our approach here ( Auyero, 2006 , Baiocchi and Connor, 2008 , Benzecry and Baiocchi, 2017 , Hagene, 2018 , Pachirat, 2018 , Schatz, 2009 ). With this political ethnographic sensibility we generated and analysed different types of data.…”

Power analysis in health policy and systems research: a guide to research conceptualisation

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