State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

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). We argue that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. In doing so, we tackle long-standing stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for. We highlight how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. We demonstrate the potential pay-off with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies, we argue, suggest a reorientation of how we understand the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. We conclude 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

A Typology for the Case Study in Social Science Following a Review of Definition, Discourse, and Structure

I propose a typology for the case study following a definition wherein various layers of classificatory principle are disaggregated. I first distinguish two parts of the case study: i) the subject of the study, which is the case itself; ii) the object, which is the analytical frame or theory through which the subject is viewed and which the subject explicates. Beyond this distinction the case study is presented as classifiable by its purposes and the approaches adopted – principally with a distinction drawn between theory-centered and illustrative study. Beyond this, there are distinctions to be drawn among various operational structures that concern comparative versus non-comparative versions of the form and the ways that the study may employ time. The typology reveals that there are numerous valid permutations of these dimensions and many trajectories therefore open to the case inquirer