Abstract
Although having been practised in the Social Sciences for decades, it was only in recent years that process tracing has gained prominence in methodological debates in political science. In spite of its popularity, however, there has been little success in formalising its methodology, defining its standards, and identifying its range of applicability. This symposium aims at furthering our understanding of the methodology by discussing four essential aspects: the underlying notion of causality, the role of theory, the problem of measurement in qualitative research, and the methodology's relationship with other forms of qualitative inquiry. It brings together methodological and substantive articles by young European scholars and summarises a round-table discussion with Peter A. Hall held at a workshop at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, in November 2010.
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Notes
In this regard, Shadish et al observe that experimentation is strong in causal description but ‘experiments do less well in clarifying the mechanisms through which and the conditions under which that causal relationship holds – what we call causal explanation’ (2002: 9–10, emphasis in original).
Note the extensive discussion of the external validity of experimental research in the Social Sciences (Morton and Williams, 2010, chapter 7; Bardsley et al, 2010, chapter 5; Lucas, 2003).
For a long time, this fundamental insight seems to have been more widespread in popular science than in academia. A related distinction is Taleb's (2010: 36) juxtaposition of ‘Mediocristan’ and ‘Extremistan’, the former being the realm of the Gaussian distribution, while the latter is irregular in the Madelbrotian sense and not predictable.
Note the similarity of this argument to the notion of ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ popularised by Surowiecki (2004).
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Kittel, B., Kuehn, D. Introduction: Reassessing the Methodology of Process Tracing. Eur Polit Sci 12, 1–9 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2012.4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2012.4