Process Tracing – Towards a New Research Agenda

• In Event: Process Tracing and Causal Mechanisms

Abstract

Over the past decade, process tracing has come into its own as method. It is taught regularly at all the major methods schools in Europe and North America; in terms of publications, we have a growing research literature on the method that goes well beyond the introductory, ‘this is how you do it’ flavour of the textbooks published in the 2010s.

With these pedagogic and publication trends in mind, this paper argues for a mid-course correction to the research agenda of process tracing. Fundamentally, the method is about the collection and then analysis of data. In recent years, we have made important advances in the analysis part, most clearly seen in the growing literature on Bayesian process tracing. To do those analytics well, however, requires rich, high quality data. Process tracing needs to think harder about this data collection – the front-end of the method, as it were. Most important, this means a greater focus – as we collect data - on within-process-tracing methods and research ethics. It also means a broadening of research transparency to consider it during data collection, especially a researcher’s positionality. Finally, we need to expand how we collect our data by developing a robust interpretive form of process tracing.

This agenda is meant to complement and not replace current efforts. It will give process tracing a richer, more ethically grounded, meta-theoretically plural set of tools for executing its data analysis.

Author

• Jeffrey T. Checkel, European University Institute