Studying relatives, neighbours and friends. An inquiry on ordinary relations to politics in the context of a French election campaign

Based on series of in-depth interviews conducted during approximately 18 months with citizens also already known by the researchers, this paper deals with the formation of French citizen’s ordinary relations to politics in the specially intense political context of the presidential election campaign. The study design will be carefully described, with a special focus on the effects of the researchers’ familiarity with the social milieu of the citizens on the data (mainly discursive) collected during the interviews. Even if not strictly faithful to the methodology of ethnographic inquiries, this design allows precise contextualisations of ordinary relations to politics. In any case, the inquiry requires the researchers to pay attention not only to their interpretative work, but also to their way of describing « their » subjects of investigation. The analysis relies on a definition of « ordinary relations » to politics that focus on daily practices and taken-for-granted perceptions of the social world. A series of in-depth « sociological portraits » will be described. It will be shown that discourses on politics are strongly linked to the interaction created by the inquiry, even among the citizens particularly interested in politics. In all cases, ordinary relations to politics, consisting in ideas or reasonings but also in combinations of « tastes and distates », appear strongly related to social positions, that is both social or professionnal backgrounds and expectations.