by Hilde van Meegdenburg
In Interpretive Process Tracing? How PT Can Become Amenable to Interpretive Research, Hilde van Meegdenburg advances an analyticist approach to PT and explores how process tracing can be made amenable to interpretive research. In this important research article in our new themed section advancing an interpretive approach to process tracing, the author addresses a key methodological tension: while process tracing is widely used in policy research and foreign policy analysis, it has largely been developed within a regularity-oriented, broadly positivist framework.
The article identifies three assumptions that underpin much existing process tracing scholarship and that pose challenges for interpretive work. First, mechanisms are often treated as real features of the empirical world. Second, they are typically understood as underpinning regular associations across causally similar cases. Third, process tracing often assumes that researchers can study empirical phenomena in a relatively objective manner. Together, these assumptions sit uneasily with interpretive approaches that emphasise socially constructed knowledge, context, and the situated nature of action.
Rather than abandoning process tracing, van Meegdenburg proposes adapting it. Her central proposal is to reconceptualise mechanisms as ideal types. In this understanding, mechanisms are not treated as features of the empirical world, but as abstract analytical constructs that function as heuristic tools. This allows the method to accommodate interpretive commitments, including the view that knowledge is socially constructed and that social reality is constituted through meaning and practice.
A key contribution is the distinction between mechanisms proper, their concrete instantiations, and the processes these instantiations form when they concatenate. Mechanisms proper are abstract and de-particularised; concrete instantiations are contextually embedded; and processes are the case-specific combinations of multiple instantiations unfolding over time. This distinction enables researchers to combine contextually rich case descriptions with more abstract analytical insights.
Importantly, this approach creates space for agency and contingency. Because mechanisms are understood as indeterminate and capable of producing different outcomes, they do not prescribe fixed causal sequences. Instead, outcomes emerge from the interaction of multiple instantiations within specific socio-institutional contexts, where case-specific developments are part of the explanation rather than deviations from it.
The article also reconsiders how findings travel beyond individual cases. Rather than emphasising generalisability based on causal homogeneity, it highlights “portability”. What travels are the abstract logics captured in mechanisms as ideal types, rather than the concrete sequences observed in particular cases.
To illustrate these arguments, van Meegdenburg reinterprets Eun A Jo’s study of collective memory and South Korean–Japanese relations, showing how mechanisms such as framing, accrediting, and binding can be understood as abstract constructs instantiated differently across historical episodes. The article concludes that analyticist PT is not inherently interpretive, but is amenable to interpretive research depending on the methodological commitments researchers bring to it.
Table of contents for Themed Section blog series on Advancing Interpretive Process Tracing in Policy Research
Interpretive Process Tracing in Policy Research (Introduction to the themed section)
by Hilde van Meegdenburg, Sandra Plümer and Johanna Kuhlmann
How social reporting put poverty on the agenda in Germany: an interpretive process tracing analysis
By Christopher Smith Ochoa
The Role of Causal Mechanisms in Policy Diffusion: Assisted Voluntary Return Policies in Germany
By Sybille Münch
Interpretive Process Tracing? How PT Can Become Amenable to Interpretive Research
by Hilde van Meegdenburg
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