State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?
State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?
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现状:关于反政治和民主不满,政治民族志可以告诉我们什么?
DOI:
10.1111/1475-6765.12270
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发表时间:
2018
影响因子:
5.3
通讯作者:
BOSWELL J
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
BOSWELL J
This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. The article tackles longstanding stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for, and highlights how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. The potential pay‐off is demonstrated with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies suggest a reorientation of how one understands the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. The article concludes by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection, and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment.