This Paper will carve out the configurational in the theories of the policy process and uses process tracing on the case of German Copyright. To do so, I will lift the hidden explanatory potential in Weibles' typology on subsystem types (2008) building on the ACF and PET. While these theories highlight processes as explanation, they seldom offer testable mechanisms. With no reference to (one of many possible) definitions, the status of their "mechanisms" and "chains" is unclear.
Configurational elements are well present in the theories of the policy process. Weible distinguishes subsystems into three ideal types by five attributes: coalitions, policy images, venues, authority and policy design. He, however, overlooked that some attributes are theoretical prior OR posterior to others - competitive coalitions (1) will attack their opponents policy images (2) - while others are not. When causality may flow in both directions, different mechanisms are at hand.
While different sequences or conjunctions are theoretically possible, the "policy design" seems to be the final attribute. In such a view, a win-lose policy design - that is the attribute for a adversarial subsystem and can be found in a couple of enacted laws in 2013/14 in Germany Copyright - can very well be the outcome of a causal chain or conjunction of the four other attributes of this type.
This Papers links theory, methodology and empirics in three steps. First, building on different definitions of mechanisms (social vs. mechanistic or deterministic vs. probabilistic), I will re-examine the most influential works that Sabatier and colleagues mention themselves in terms of their understanding of causality. Second, I deduce causal mechanisms for adversarial policy processes from those studies that share their understanding of mechanisms with Weible 2008. Third, I will provide empirical process tracing tests on the case.
