‘Ethno, Ethno, What?’: Using Ethnography to Explore the European Parliament’s Political Groups in Turbulent Times

Abstract

<p>Ethnography is still relatively unknown, not just to parliamentary interlocutors, but also to some political scientists. In this chapter, I ask: what does ethnography add to existing qualitative research on the political groups of the European Parliament, more specifically on the substantive themes of the book: democracy, party politics and turbulent times? Secondly, drawing on the chapter’s title, I offer a practical illustration of how ethnography might be conducted of the political groups and elucidate the practices and challenges that this entails. The chapter is based upon my ethnographic research conducted in the 8th and 9th European Parliaments. I introduce shadowing, meeting ethnography and ‘hanging out’ as three ethnographic practices and assess their helpfulness for studying different political group activities. Overall, I present parliamentary ethnography as not only affording practical benefits to researchers, but also how it provides unparalleled knowledge about entanglements and relationships between political group actors and institutions.</p>