Interpretive Process Tracing in policy research

Policy & Politics, vol. 54, pp. 357–378

Abstract

The goal of this article – which also functions as the introduction to a themed section – is to establish and further develop an interpretive variant of Process Tracing (PT) for policy research: Interpretive Process Tracing (IPT). Inspired by the turn towards mechanism-based explanations, policy scholars started studying the causal mechanisms that shape policy making. However, the dominant understanding of PT establishes the method as largely positivist and regularity-oriented. Yet, much truly qualitative policy scholarship looks for thick descriptions and is rather interested in locally embedded, actor-oriented policy processes accounting for actor sense and meaning-making. This article therefore advances a second, so far less visible strand of PT that would facilitate a focus on policy making as a social and meaning-making process: IPT. We outline IPT’s ontological and epistemological foundations and think through what they mean for IPT as a method . This way, we develop further the logic and the tools to study policy processes from an interpretive perspective and introduce IPT as an approach that focuses on the social mechanisms that constitute the process. While this article introduces the method theoretically and provides an overview, the three articles in this themed section on IPT showcase how it can be applied in and to practical research.

Authors 3

1. Hilde van Meegdenburg Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   https://dx.doi.org/https://ror.org/027bh9e22Leiden University, The Netherlands

2. Sandra Plümer

   Bielefeld University · University of Duisburg-Essen

   Affiliation as printed

   https://dx.doi.org/https://ror.org/02hpadn98University of Duisburg-Essen and Bielefeld University, Germany

3. Johanna Kuhlmann

   University of Bremen

   Affiliation as printed

   https://dx.doi.org/https://ror.org/04ers2y35University of Bremen, Germany