Interpretive Process Tracing

The concept of process tracing have had an important influence on recent developments in political-science debates on a methodology of qualitative policy analysis. However, process tracing remained embedded in the research logic of comparative and variable-based methodology. This article aims to show that process tracing can be used in an interpretative perspective and that critical power analysis can be developed by process tracing in a more detailed way. Until now, interpretive qualitative research has adopted the notion of process tracing but has tended to perceive it as a label for a method and failed to apply it with the necessary consistency. Readily used as a label, it has been applied without systematically considering the category of „causal mechanism“. This terminology initially sounds intimidating for interpretative research, but it can be used in a less mechanistic or rational-choice-based form. With interpretive process tracing (IPT), including the search for causal mechanisms, it is possible not only to explain individual cases, but also to make contributions to comparative research and theory building. Some basic features of IPT are presented below: 1. Process analysis is a form of qualitative political research that remains open to the interpretative tradition of qualitative social research and does not fit into the structuring of all research through the categories of independent and dependent variables. 2. The detailed analysis of individual cases is central to IPT. The reconstruction of the chronology of an political episode and the interaction of the relevant individual and collective actors form the basis of a power analysis of decision-making processes. 3. The possibility of comparing such individual case arises at the level of process sequences, not at the level of cases (or systems, regimes, policy fields). IPT contributes to the presentation of generalisable results by making it possible to find the same causal mechanisms (on the level of process sequences) in very different cases. 4. IPT must be developed in close connection with theories of causal mechanisms - and thus in cooperation between various social sciences, especially political science and sociology. 5. Elementary causal mechanisms start at the level of individual and collective actors and comprise only one causal link, complex causal mechanisms comprise several successive steps and are composed of a sequence of activities. 6. Three types of elementary mechanisms can be distinguished: perception mechanisms, action and interaction mechanisms. Perception mechanisms entails the cognitive or emotional processing and interpreting of what is perceived and experienced. Action mechanisms concentrate on the activities an actor can undertake unilaterally. Interaction mechanisms include the temporally synchronous participation of actors in a communication process. 7. IPT can be visualized very easily in a matrix scheme of time and actors involved. References: Nullmeier, Frank 2021: Kausale Mechanismen und Process Tracing, Frankfurt, New York: Campus. Kuhlmann, Johanna/Nullmeier, Frank (eds) 2022: Causal Mechanisms in the Global Development of Social Policies, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.