Political Ethnography and the Erosion to Liberal Norms: An Agenda

• In Event: Fieldwork in Political Science 2. Reflections on Ethnographic Methods.

Abstract

This paper celebrates the “rediscovery” (Schatz 2017) of ethnography by political science and its current momentum, by briefly reviewing some contemporary ethnographic approaches in the discipline and arguing that there is more openness to ethnographic approaches in the field. It then argues that ethnography offers some valuable insights into classic political science problems: for instance, rather than taking it at face value, an ethnographic sensibility inverts Down’s Paradox and shows that, from the ethnographer’s point of view, the most puzzling aspect of this paradox is the fact that mainstream political science did not ask voters why they voted, opting instead for a purely theoretical pursuit of what could have been an empirical agenda. The paper then argues that ethnography is a crucial method for studying contemporary threats to liberal democratic order and the phenomenon of democratic backsliding as it provides access to a diversity of otherwise inaccessible subjects who are at the forefront of these transformations. Based on the co-authors’ participation in the Mexican Initiative for Differed Action (MIDA) research program housed at Baruch College, CUNY, which is a multi-sited, longitudinal, comparative ethnographic study of Mexican immigrant and mixed-status households that spans the Obama and Trump administrations, the paper argues that ethnography’s strengths can usefully illuminate key processes eroding or buttressing liberal norms. Using our field work we show 1) how ethnography provides an understanding of how immigrant families experience the “Trump effect” in their everyday lives, and 2) how, at the micro-level, the rise of Trump has had contradictory effects, energizing some actors to defend immigrants, while emboldening anti-immigrant forces. Finally, the paper concludes by recommending that political science continue its use of ethnography but that it should more explicitly leverage key strengths of case-oriented research design, including explicitly making the case for the cases compared, the ability to use logical inference to discern various causal pathways (rather than average effects in a “central tendency” analytical story) and identify equifinality.

Authors

• Andres Besserer Rayas, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Robert Courtney Smith, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, and Sociology, Grad Center, CUNY