KEITH DARDEN
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: UKRAINE
In the sweltering July of 2009, I spent several weeks driving the pitted roads in rural areas of southwestern Ukraine. The campaign for the January 2010 presidential elections that ultimately brought Viktor Yanukovych to power was already in full swing. I was in the country to try to understand the persistent regional divides in Ukraine—the very ones along which Ukraine would later cleave through secession and war when Yanukovych was forced out of office in February of 2014.
The specific puzzle that brought me to this part of Ukraine was a sharp discontinuity in voting patterns along an imaginary line spanning much of the country that ran through northern Odessa province. Villages that were walking distance apart across this line differed from one another in no obvious socioeconomic characteristics, but they voted very differently. To the south of the line, large majorities supported Russophile parties and candidates. To the north, those candidates and parties received marginal support. It was something of a Ukrainian Mason-Dixon line, and my hypothesis was that this split had to do with a cultural divide that was the legacy of the boundary between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
My initial research plan had been twofold. First, I was going to collect polling station–level voting data—information that at the time was not available on the internet or in Kyiv—from the districts within a narrow band on either side of the Kodyma creek, which served as the eighteenth-century boundary between Ottoman and Polish territories. Second, I wanted to do some semistructured interviews with people from villages on either side to see whether there were differences in underlying cultural attitudes, language use, or other variables that had not been measured in any existing data sets. But I also wanted to understand why people voted the way that they did, and that created a whole host of problems I hadn’t anticipated.
The main problem was that asking people about voting was a sensitive topic. People generally wouldn’t talk. One respondent disclosed to me that vote-buying was common in these parts of Ukraine, but that was revealed after we had split a couple bottles of bad Moldovan cognac in a local tavern. In general, voting and vote-selling was something people were nervous about discussing, particularly with a foreigner. They had some experience with international election monitors, and they often feared the local administration, who did not want any reports of election violations coming from their districts. I could provide no assurances to get them to talk. The usual boilerplate language assuring respondents of their anonymity didn’t persuade anyone. Respondents knew they weren’t really anonymous because I had found them, and I typically knew their names and addresses. In a rural post-Communist context, where people had no concept of neutral scholarship and were not inclined to trust strangers anyway, the risks of disclosing information about illegal voting practices—and particularly vote-buying—were greater than the reward (zero). Plying them with cognac or vodka didn’t seem like a viable research strategy over the long term. It would probably lead to a biased sample of hard drinking males, and it might end badly for any number of reasons. The institutional review board (IRB) definitely wouldn’t approve. How do you get people to talk about sensitive topics when they don’t trust you, and they have no reason to trust you to keep their information anonymous because (unlike a university’s IRB) they have no concept of social scientific research?
The solution, it turned out, was my faithful rental car: a cheap black four-cylinder Hyundai with Odessa city plates. In the Ukraine of 2009, there were no ride-sharing services, scant few taxis in rural areas, infrequent and inconvenient buses, and most people did not own cars. To get around between villages and towns in the area, people would stand by the roadside with their hand out until a driver stopped. They would tell the driver where they were headed, and if it was on the driver’s way, everyone would agree on a price and the driver would take you there. It was similar to an informal ride-sharing or taxi service in which everyone participated.
So I started picking up rides. At first, I thought this would make my limited time in the field more productive. Given the poor quality of the roads, it could take several hours to go a hundred kilometers. If I could squeeze some interviews in on my drives between districts and polling stations, I’d get more done. Moreover, I thought it would be an easy way to approach people—one that didn’t involve being a creepy foreigner knocking on doors or stopping people in the fields. Plus the car kept me safe from stray dogs, which were ubiquitous in the countryside. It seemed like a great idea.
And it was. When I was just a taxi driver—a chance encounter and a limited, anonymous transactional relationship—people were suddenly happy to talk: about themselves, their families, and … most important … about the elections—who they voted for and why, and about the vote-buying that was going on all around us. Other than the different circumstances of our meeting, I approached people in the same way, identifying myself as a professor from Yale University in the United States who was studying Ukrainian elections, and I asked them if I could pose a few questions. But on the drive, people were far more forthcoming. Not everyone was offered money for their vote, but they all knew of the practice. In fact, they knew quite a bit. For example, the going rate for a vote at the time ranged from 20 to 50 Hryvnia (4–10 USD), but 20 or 30 was pretty standard, and the people who managed the vote-buying were called agitatory (agitators). Each party or candidate had its own agitator, who was generally a local person. The respondents had no shame about taking money to vote, but they often took offense when I asked whether they actually voted for the candidate they had been paid to vote for. Of course! They kept their word. There was no way to monitor compliance, but apparently there didn’t need to be. At the end of the interviews, I invited them to ask any question they might have of me, and I made it clear that they could rely on me to answer entirely truthfully because we would never see each other again. This seemed like appropriate compensation for the information they shared with me, but only a few people took advantage of it.
The breakthrough came a couple of weeks into this stint as a Ukrainian taxi driver when I picked up a middle-aged woman and her teenaged daughter heading to a town about twenty minutes away. It was a bit off my path, but I took them anyway because the long drives were yielding great material. After chatting for a bit and getting some background information (how many generations her family had lived in this area, for example), I asked if I could question them about the election. I started with my usual question about whether they had ever been approached by an agitator. The woman became very excited and said proudly that she, herself, was an agitator for one of the two main political parties, indeed, the one that was dominant in that particular region.
Over the course of the drive she explained to me how the entire system worked. The agitators were given a fixed budget and a district to cover, but it was up to them to choose how to spend their money to get the best results in the election. Her strategy was to go door-to-door and talk to people to get a sense of whether they had any strong prior feeling about any of the candidates. If they had strong feelings at all, she simply thanked them for their time and moved on. If they were uncertain or indifferent, she would offer them money to vote for her candidate, and they were generally quite happy to accept. Agitators were evaluated based on the election results from their districts, and they could be hired for future campaigns if they were effective. It was a remarkable interview.
In the end, the cultural legacies of empire certainly mattered. They shaped voters’ basic orientation toward Russia, which became quite important in Ukrainian elections in the twenty-first century. But these basic inclinations were buttressed by substantial provincial-level political machines that were effectively buying the votes of the undecided, and solidifying and sharpening the differences between electoral districts on opposite sides of the historical imperial divides. Without my time behind the wheel, I would have missed half of the story.
Why did interviews in the car work so well? When it comes to getting people to share private information with you, anonymity is better than trust. These interactions were perfect because they were purely anonymous—and more important—the respondents knew it was anonymous because they knew exactly the circumstances under which we had met: a chance encounter. I had not selected them. They had ultimately chosen to get in my car. And they knew perfectly well that unless they chose to share their identifying information with me, I would not have it. I had no power over them because I didn’t know who they were, and no harm could come from talking to me. Under those circumstances, people proved very willing to talk.
We tend to think that repeated contact, intimacy, and relationships get people to be more likely to bare their souls. The presumption of the “ethnographic interview,”1 or most serial interviewing techniques, is that familiarity and trust are the keys to knowledge.2 But trust is not the key to all forms of knowledge. Children lie to parents. Husbands lie to wives. The more intimate we are with someone, the more we care what they think about us, and the more we try to shape their perception and varnish their image of us. Perhaps for certain topics, the more intimate we are with our respondents, the less we will really learn. To be sure, in some circumstances neither brevity nor anonymity are possible. For example, if we are seeking to understand particularly complex processes that are long in the telling, follow-up interviews and intimacy may be required.3 But sensitive facts are more likely to be revealed to the anonymous stranger. The fleeting encounter—the mythic conversation with the cab driver—may not be of much use if you are the passenger, but it’s a great tool if you’re in the driver’s seat.
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Keith Darden is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University.
PUBLICATION TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Darden, Keith. “Imperial Footprints: Colonial Legacies, Party Machines, and Contemporary Voting” (in progress).
NOTES
1. James P. Spradley, The Ethnographic Interview (Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1979).
2. The notion that familiarity and trust are critical tools goes back to the anthropology of Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski. For more recent treatments, see Robert S. Weiss, Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Benjamin L. Read, “Serial Interviews: When and Why to Talk to Someone More Than Once,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 17, no. 1 (December 2018): 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406918783452.
3. Lee Ann Fujii, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017).