Interpretive process tracing?: How PT can become amenable to interpretive research

Meegdenburg, H. van

doi:doi:10.1332/03055736Y2026D000000091

Process tracing (PT) is a popular method that is increasingly applied in policy studies, including foreign policy analysis (FPA). However, while policy research and FPA have strong interpretivist strands, PT has been predominantly developed and applied within a regularity-oriented, broadly positivist framework. This article advances an analyticist approach to PT for policy research. Pivoting around ideal typification, it reconceptualizes mechanisms as ideal types and distinguishes between mechanisms proper, their concrete instantiations, and the processes they concatenate into. This reconceptualization enables researchers to treat knowledge as socially constructed, to produce meaning-sensitive and contextually rich case descriptions while retaining the possibility of drawing analytically general and portable conclusions, and to advance a constitutive understanding of causation grounded in locally embedded processes. Although not inherently interpretive, this reconceptualization...Show moreProcess tracing (PT) is a popular method that is increasingly applied in policy studies, including foreign policy analysis (FPA). However, while policy research and FPA have strong interpretivist strands, PT has been predominantly developed and applied within a regularity-oriented, broadly positivist framework. This article advances an analyticist approach to PT for policy research. Pivoting around ideal typification, it reconceptualizes mechanisms as ideal types and distinguishes between mechanisms proper, their concrete instantiations, and the processes they concatenate into. This reconceptualization enables researchers to treat knowledge as socially constructed, to produce meaning-sensitive and contextually rich case descriptions while retaining the possibility of drawing analytically general and portable conclusions, and to advance a constitutive understanding of causation grounded in locally embedded processes. Although not inherently interpretive, this reconceptualization makes PT amenable to interpretive research in ways the regularity-oriented approach is not.The advantages of this approach are shown through a reinterpretation of a published FPA study by Eun A. Jo: ‘Memory, Institutions, and the Domestic Politics of South Korean–Japanese Relations’.This example demonstrates the added value of analyticist PT highlighting the sometimes nuanced differences in what regularity-oriented and analyticist approaches to PT afford.
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Interpretive process tracing? How PT can become amenable to interpretive research