“Jordan is celebrating its wedding; just the groom is missing.” Um Shadi, a young woman from Ma’an, gives a short but incisive answer to my question about the importance of the upcoming parliamentary elections. Like in other Arab countries, national elections in Jordan are customarily called “national weddings.” And so, in November 2010, Jordan held an officially dubbed “national wedding” to replace the parliament dissolved the previous year by the king. Since the bread riots of April 1989, elections have become commonplace in Jordan. Despite widespread cynicism, they remain a deeply symbolic event in the periphery of Jordan and have profound political impact on power and domination structures. Taking the last parliamentary elections as an example, my paper explores participation in elections from a micro-perspective. My intention is to re-narrate the story of the 2010 parliamentary elections by re-reading their informal dimension, in an attempt to identify hidden forms of participatory politics. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ma’an over the period from October to November 2010 and March to October 2011, the paper elaborates on contestations and negotiations according to which political participation is organized and practiced, seeking to elaborate on the link between formal and informal participation forms, and their respective roles in including and excluding actors. By researching participation in elections from a micro-political perspective, the paper attempts to reveal power struggles between different agents; it provides insights into how the field of politics is reinforced, altered, or undermined by qualitatively different modes of participatory politics. In doing so, it uncovers hidden modes of politics and thus delivers alternative explanations for political practices beyond tribalism, clientelism, and patronage. This angle has been almost overlooked in relation to Jordan. I will argue that in order to grasp political realities in peripheral Jordan accurately, the social embeddedness of the institution “elections,” the permanent adaptation of social practices, and the enormous fluidity between the formal and informal realms must be considered. As the example of elections illustrates, the reinvention and transformation of informal modes of participation have altered possibilities of political participation, as well as the relationship between state and society. This manifests itself in an ambiguous process of both referring to and opposing the state due to struggles between powerful agents within the political field, as my empirical data indicate. Conceptually, the paper draws upon Migdal’s state-in-society approach and Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, and habitus.