Political Ethnography as a Method for Understanding Urban Politics and Elections in India

Published date01 June 2016
DOI10.1177/2321023016634962
AuthorManisha Priyam
Date01 June 2016
Subject MatterNotes on Methods
Notes on Methods
Political Ethnography as a
Method for Understanding Urban
Politics and Elections in India
Manisha Priyam1
Introduction
This commentary on the use of the ethnographic method in understanding urban politics and elections in
India is on the one hand an attempt to advance methodological pluralism in comprehending electoral
politics and change, and on the other, makes use of more specific insights drawn from the use of the
method in understanding politics in an urban periphery. The promise of the first (methodological plural-
ism) is a more general one—that of using ethnography to expand the methods basket employed to
perceive and comprehend the special political event of elections. These should not remain confined to
diagnostics from ‘Large N’ samples and use of quantitative techniques alone. While these quantitative
techniques explain or at least stylize categorical data using rigorous selection procedures and data analy-
sis techniques, and posit explanations for large outcomes (such as election results), they are unable to tell
us much on the interpretive aspects of voter behaviour, including the meanings that citizens attach to the
political action of voting. In what appears to be a neat and categorical division of labour, the quantitative
methods are seen here as best suited for the ‘Large N’, and the ethnographic as a part of the qualitative
methods suited for the ‘small n’. For the former, apart from its suitability for a large scale, there is also
the claim of impersonal generalizability of research outcomes, while the latter remain thick narratives of
the personal.2 In this binary division (of labour and epistemic terrains), the ethnographic method is con-
sidered at best a supplement to the more rigorous studies done on a generalizable scale.
It is in the second—the more specific insights generated from the use of the ethnographic method in
understanding electoral politics in an unauthorized urban slum settlement of the labouring poor—that the
sui generis potential of this method (i.e., the ethnographic method) is realized. Used alongside other
methods, synchronized in their study of ‘electoral time’, and observing people and institutions up close
and on the ground, according significance to experience and meanings, it not just adds to what we know
about elections and politics from a subjective perspective. At the very least, it is in argument with these
Note: This section is coordinated by Divya Vaid (divya.vaid09@gmail.com).
1 National University for Educational Planning and Administration.
2 That the difference in scale is not the real difference between the quantitative method and ethnographies is also highlighted by
the fact that a survey using techniques of randomness is possible for a small sample—for which ethnography can also be done. The
difference in the two methods still remains in terms of differences in research practice and theoretical interpretation thereafter.
Studies in Indian Politics
4(1) 119–127
© 2016 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/2321023016634962
http://inp.sagepub.com
Corresponding author:
Manisha Priyam, National University for Educational Planning and Administration, 17-B Aurobindo Marg, New
Delhi 110016, India.
E-mail: priyam.manisha@gmail.com

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