Frederic Charles Schaffer

Thin Descriptions: The Limits of Survey Research on the Meaning of Democracy

Survey researchers have produced a body of evidence suggesting that people’s understandings of democracy are surprisingly consistent worldwide. This article challenges that finding by comparing the results of a 2002 survey conducted in the Philippines with the results of my own 2001 fieldwork in one Philippine community where, using interpretive rather than survey-research tools, I also investigated how people understand democracy. The article identifies three generic methodological problems—compression, compartmentalization, and homogenization—that have led survey researchers in the Philippines and beyond to simplify meanings and falsely twin roughly equivalent words in different languages. The global consistency in meaning that survey researchers have discovered appears to be the product not of converging worldviews, but of specific procedures used to record, code, and interpret interview responses. Insofar as democracy-promotion initiatives are shaped by such surveys, their misleading quality is not only of methodological concern, but of immediate political relevance.

Not-So-Individual Voting: Patriarchal Control and Familial Hedging in Political Elections around the World

It is almost axiomatic in the study of elections that within the context of the family household, the vote is an expression of individual preference. This article questions how widely this assumption of individual voting applies to actual household members around the world by taking notice of two empirical anomalies that are particularly salient to understanding the electoral behavior of women: controlled voting (the dictating of women’s and younger men’s vote choices by senior male household members) and split voting (the deliberate allocation of a family’s votes across two or more candidates). Controlled voting and split voting complicate assumptions that within the context of the family household, individual voters are always sovereign over their vote choices or the most enlightening units of analysis.