This paper intends to demonstrate the fruitfulness of ethnographic methods for the study of political participation in authoritarian regimes. In traditional political science literature, political participation has been regarded through an instrumental and individualist perspective (Verba & Nie, 1972). While this conceptualisation has often been transposed from democratic settings to authoritarian contexts (e.g. Shi, 1997 on participation in China), recent studies have emphasised the impossibility to reduce participation in such context to a means of influence upon decision-making process (e.g. Heberer & Schubert, 2008, on participation in Chinese urban communities) or to a step towards a future democratisation (Bennani-Chraïbi & Fillieule, 2003). Despite these theoretical insights, scholars seldom explore participative practices as they unfold in situ. In qualitative studies, methods often rely on interviews and investigate the sole actors’ perceptions of their own actions. The paper supports the idea that the use of ethnography in the study of grass-roots level participation provides a better understanding of the bottom-up dynamics of authoritarian regimes. Rather defined as an interaction process (Scaff, 1975), participation has to be observed empirically in order to determine how both discursive/practical openings and constraints are constructed through actions. Based on the case studies of China and Algeria, the paper will be organised as follows: First, from an interactionnist perspective (Blumer, 1969), we will examine how meanings are used and produced by actors throughout participation acts. Second, we will discuss how these meaning-making practices influence relations of power at the local level.
