Is there an ethnographic turn in political science research and, if so, what does it contribute to the discipline? As this symposium recounts, methodological approaches to political science research have produced notable debates and disputes within the profession. Schwartz-Shea and Majic suggest this may be a “late methodological moment,” in any event, an opportune time to take a fresh look at old battles and, more importantly, take the next steps toward building an understanding of ethnographic strategies, clarifying their use, and considering their contributions. Contributions to this forum provide a glimpse into the state of the art and present examples suggestive of the variety and range of studies that have benefited from the use of ethnographic methods. They also indicate that work remains to be done to clarify and better elaborate these tools of the trade, when, and how they are used.

Ethnographic research is presented here as a big tent proposition, with the editors leaving it to authors to define the terms on which they use ethnography and to discuss the types of methods they deploy. This definitional looseness (about which I will say more later) is likely to be problematic over the longer-term; but it may be strategic in the short-term, avoiding splintering an already small subset of political science research and opening new possibilities to consideration.

Moreover, this looseness is counterbalanced, in a sense, by contributions that bring a helpful specificity to bear, describing individual research strategies and reflecting on what ethnographic methods bring to the table. This takes the discussion beyond general arguments to consider ethnographic methods in a more fine-grained way. Contributors describe how they have used ethnographic approaches to advance theory and develop empirical evidence, notably in studies that take up the politics of rights and gender (Majic), social mobilization (Kang), congress and lawmaking (Curry), marginalization and mobilization (Forrest), and socio-political networks (Simmons and Smith commenting on Wimmer). These rich examples provide a foundation for discussion and potentially inspiration to scholars contemplating the use of ethnographic methods in their own research.

In that big tent spirit, I offer some reflections on the ethnographic approach to political research, what distinguishes it from other approaches, and how it contributes to the discipline. These brief reflections, necessarily more suggestive than definitive, are intended to contribute to on-going discussion, adding the perspective of one who has engaged in this type of research for nearly three decades.

I begin with the question of what distinguishes ethnographic methods from other approaches to political science research. To put the matter succinctly, ethnographic approaches build on the premise that people do not function in a vacuum; their modes of thought and behavior develop in interaction with their real world environment. ^{Footnote 1} Ethnography offers tools of inquiry that are particularly well-suited to research that seeks to contextualize political behaviors and beliefs and examine the processes through which they are shaped and expressed in real-life settings.

Ethnographic approaches provide a different vantage point on political behaviors and beliefs from approaches that essentially disassemble individuals into component parts and reassemble them into analytically relevant categories that can be modeled or measured in relation to variables of interest. They also differ from studies of formal structures and institutions that involve static analyses or comparisons of rules and laws. In contrast, ethnographic methods offer strategies for studying people as fully-constituted human beings interacting with the institutions and organizations in which they are embedded. The institutions and organizations of interest may be nation states, legislative institutions, political parties, public bureaucracies, labor organizations, workplaces, community groups, and churches, among others. The focus depends on the theoretical and empirical questions to be examined.

The basic point is that ethnographic approaches to political research treat human behavior and thought not as phenomena that develop in a vacuum, but as phenomena that develop in real world settings. Ethnographic strategies provide tools for investigating those developments and how specific settings may enhance some possibilities for political thought and behavior and limit others. To be clear: this is not to say this form of research is superior to others, but that it is different and serves different purposes.

Ethnographic research is different in yet another way, which requires a bit more explanation. Specifically, ethnographic studies open to inquiry areas of political activity that are not necessarily recognized as political, because they occur outside of “normal” political channels ^{Footnote 2} and on terms that are not explicitly or even intentionally political. Yet, these activities may be understood as political to the extent that they have bearing on how beliefs are shaped and interests advanced or suppressed. In effect, they are political to the extent that they, directly or indirectly, affect “who gets what, when, and how” (Lasswell Reference Lasswell1936). Ethnographic methods enable researchers to probe beyond the boundaries of their assumptions by immersing themselves in the world of their subjects and learning how their subjects experience the world.

A case-in-point is Scott’s (Reference Scott1985) classic work on “weapons of the weak,” which illuminated how forms of political belief and action could be shaped by opportunities in the environment, also revealing a structure of opportunities deeply biased in favor of prevailing power relationships. Piven and Cloward (Reference Piven and Cloward1971 andReference Piven and Cloward1979) made a similar point, albeit more provocatively, in studies that treated protest and even, at times, vandalism and law-breaking, not as deviance, but as modes of political expression. They argued that, under certain circumstances, acts that violated social norms or, at times, explicit law, should be understood as acts of political defiance, whether they took place on the factory floor or on neighborhood streets. Recognizing the everyday realities of life in disadvantaged communities provided a foundation from which Piven and Cloward challenged pluralist theory, arguing that opportunities for political voice were not equally distributed as Dahl had famously suggested in his celebration of a “normal” politics through which “all the active and legitimate groups in the population can make themselves heard....” (Dahl Reference Dahl1956,137). ^{Footnote 3} Piven and Cloward contended that for marginalized populations normal political channels provided few opportunities to be heard; voice necessarily found other channels.

As these examples illustrate, ethnographic approaches contribute to the methodological toolbox of political inquiry because they allow one to see different things and to see things differently. Rather than beginning by specifying variables of interest and excluding others, ethnographic methods provide a means to reach beyond assumptions about what matters and discover the previously unknown and unexpected. This openness to learning from the lived experiences of others has the potential to payoff in new knowledge and new understandings of political phenomena.

Contributors to this symposium have described insights they developed as they entered into previously unfamiliar worlds where they could view how the everyday political life of others was constructed. Their examples suggest how exploration of these varied worlds can enable researchers to chart new political terrain and make visible dimensions of political behaviors and beliefs that are otherwise unseen and unrecognized.

For example, Forrest comments on his unexpected realization of a disjuncture between what community organizers were saying about their efforts to mobilize disadvantaged members of the community and what their strategies were doing. He discovered that organizers, as they worked to raise enrolled membership, were inadvertently undermining engagement and social mobilization of the membership they were manifestly committed to increase. This is a reminder that observation and interviewing are useful strategies for exposing contradictions between what people say they’re doing (and may think they are doing) and what they are actually doing, contradictions that other methods are less likely to reveal. ^{Footnote 4}

Similarly, combing official documents hardly prepared Kang for what she observed when she went out into the field. The interactions she observed on the ground between trade union activists, government officials, and others revealed political dynamics that had been invisible in formal documents, official pronouncements, or statements of major political figures. Her keen observations led to her discovery of what she came to understand as “repertoires of contention,” opening a new window into South Korean labor politics.

Majic also writes of her unanticipated discovery that sex workers did not fit the caricature of disempowered victims but, in certain contexts, displayed strengths, assertiveness, and a sense of political empowerment that ran contrary to expectations. Through her observations, she also revealed a hidden form of politics in which staff providing social services through their routine practices, resisted normative and legal biases against sex work and effectively expressed a rights-based approach, treating sex workers as workers with “legitimate” occupational health and safety concerns. ^{Footnote 5}

Surprise, discovery, and giving visibility to otherwise invisible phenomena are recurring themes in political research deploying ethnographic methods. Ethnographic methods seem to facilitate these salutary outcomes, even if they do not necessarily assure them. But toward what end are these outcomes beneficial? In focusing on ethnography as methodology, one should not lose sight of the bigger picture. For the most part, methods are a means to an end; they are the tools of political inquiry, not its substance. ^{Footnote 6} Their value derives from the evidence and dimensions of political life that they enable researchers to observe and make visible, enabling them to challenge, build, or contest theory. Ad hoc or casual observation should not be confused with the approaches discussed here.

Other examples of ethnography in political science can be found in my own field of street-level research and theory. Ethnographic methods have played an important part in the study of street-level organizations (SLOs), those agencies that operate at the interface of the individual and the state and effectively mediate both policy and politics (Brodkin Reference Brodkin, Brodkin and Marston2013a, Lipsky Reference Lipsky1980). Street-level studies have variously utilized deep organizational immersion, observation, in-depth interviews, and surveys to collect evidence needed to investigate broader political phenomena, among them the politics of the welfare state, neo-liberal governance, informal justice, and racial representation (Brodkin Reference Brodkin, Brodkin and Marston2013b, Herd and Lightman Reference Herd and Lightman2005, Infantino Reference Infantino2016, Larsen and Wright Reference Larsen and Wright2014, Lens Reference Lens, Brodkin and Marston2013, Watkins-Hayes Reference Watkins-Hayes2011). Some street-level studies have adopted multi-method strategies that purposefully build on ethnographic insights from field research and test them against other types of data, as, for example, in Soss, Fording, and Schram’s (Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011) innovative work addressing questions of inequality and state-enacted disciplining of disadvantaged populations.

Most of these organizational studies do not meet the single criterion for “political ethnography” advanced by Schatz (Reference Schatz2009) in his important work on this subject, namely, the use of participant-observation. Instead, they tend to favor various combinations of direct observation, interviews, and surveys. Perhaps, even with the big tent approach of this symposium, the tent flaps require some adjustment? ^{Footnote 7}

Although the scholars conducting street-level research may not participate in the organizations they study, they do study human behavior and thought in situ, using observations and interviews (sometimes along with other methods) to enter the life-world of the organizations under examination. However, in contrast to anthropological research, understanding the life-world of selected organizations is not the overarching purpose, but rather an intermediate objective. The data collected through ethnographic methods at the micro-level become the point-of-departure for analyses of broader macro-level political phenomena. In this sense, ethnographic methods provide a way of seeing big by looking small.

Clearly, political studies using ethnographic methods do not conform to a single approach or necessarily address similar types of questions. Whether this is a problem or a virtue (allowing the method to fit the case) remains to be assessed. This symposium has not attempted to make a full assessment of ethnographic research in the discipline nor has it set out a common methodological template. However, it does shed light on the breadth of research that has productively used ethnographic approaches, which may, indeed, be evidence of an ethnographic turn in political science. If so, this has promise for opening up new areas of political inquiry and giving visibility to areas of political thought and behavior that are harder, if not impossible, to reach by other means.

There is ample room for developing and more fully elaborating this line of research, which may be necessary if ethnographic methods are to consolidate their place in the discipline. But surely there is a productive path for new generations of scholars who choose to adopt ethnographic approaches to political research. Some may be deterred by the cautionary advice offered in this symposium warning of the difficulties and challenges facing those who would take this path. Indeed, the work can be difficult, complex, and time-consuming.

But what about the rewards? Ethnographic research provides entry into fascinating processes of discovery and engagement with worlds mostly outside our own. It bring us in touch with the unfamiliar and unexpected, inviting us to learn how political life and possibilities are shaped in quotidian worlds that are beyond the sight of others. It also provides an opportunity to give recognition to these worlds and those whose political realities and interests may otherwise be unseen and unheard. This is the prospect—and the challenge—that lies beyond the computer screen, out in the world where politics lives and breathes in everyday life.