Political Ethnography and Fieldwork in the Study of Contemporary Populism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Over the past two decades populism has entered the political debate of academics and practitioners alike. Recent scholarship has worked to clarify the definition of the concept, to deepen our understanding of its practice and trajectory, and to lay out a strong research agenda for the study of populist movements, parties, and political actors. By and large this agenda has embraced a multi-method approach, emphasizing the importance of surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, and quantitative measures. These methods have helped to refine the analytical definition of populism while also providing valuable insights into the ability of populist ideas and practices to sweep into political arenas with speed and force. This panel adds to this ongoing discussion while widening the methodological approach to include ethnographic and fieldwork based studies of populist discourse and practice. Our hope is to contribute to both sides of the discussion: enriching our understanding of how populism functions, while offering how ethnographic methods open up new and important lines of inquiry for the ongoing research agenda.

Ethnographic approaches allow for the study and analysis of populism from the inside out, enabling researchers to explore how political actors--citizens, leaders, and political entrepreneurs--understand political contexts themselves, and how these understandings lead to particular positions and decisions within those contexts. With long term and/or immersive projects, fieldwork provides analytic leverage in tracking dynamic political processes, allowing researchers to see how actors interpret changes and develop over time. Together, these qualities can provide leverage for researchers to explore how citizens and practitioners develop, deploy, and take up populist frames, and how the thin-ideology of populism is coupled to other worldviews.

Further, an ethnographic approach gives researchers the ability to understand how actors interpret the political world in ways that are ambiguous, conflictual, at odds with societal norms, or dismissive of empirical reality. In a political arena where conflicts over truth claims can dominate much of the discussion, immersive fieldwork gives researchers an opportunity to observe this process as it happens, and to examine how political actors use differing claims to make sense of the political world. Thus, the process is one of understanding not just what matters to political actors, but why certain phenomena matter (and why others do not), and how the process of making a phenomenon meaningful has political outcomes. For the study of populism, such an approach has much to offer, especially for researchers interested in movements and parties at the edges of the ideological spectrum.

The papers on this panel use empirical research drawn from a number of distinct cases to speak to different components of populist discourse, theory, and practice. Kanisha Bond explores the rise of grassroots anti-racist and anti-fascist movements in Canada and the United States in response to the rise of the Alt-Right. Focusing on Podemos in Spain, Paloma Caravantes examines the tension between the discourse and practices of feminism in a left-populist electoral party. Carolyn Holmes looks to the ascendancy of the “white violence” narrative in South Africa, and how global political entrepreneurs are using this narrative to promote a wider agenda of white victimhood. Comparing party politics across a number of western countries, Jamie Lluch argues for a clearer definition of populist parties. Each author uses ethnographic and fieldwork-based methods in their research, and also discusses the value of these methods in the study of populism.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 46: Qualitative and Multi-Method Research

Individual Presentations

• Mobilization on Whose Margins? Anti-Racist Action in the US and Canada - Kanisha Bond, University of Maryland, College Park

• Feminist Politics and Left-Populist Parties. An Ethnographic Study of Podemos - Paloma Caravantes-Gonzalez, Rutgers University

• White Victimhood Gone Viral: South African Farm Violence Activists - Carolyn Ethel Holmes, Mississippi State University

• Populism, Nationalism, and Conceptual Stretching - Jaime Gerardo Lluch, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras

Chair

• Biko Koenig Franklin & Marshall College