Christopher Smith Ochoa
In a strong contribution to our new themed section on Interpretive Process Tracing, this article examines how poverty became recognised as a legitimate policy issue in Germany, bringing interpretive process tracing into dialogue with policy feedback theory to explain how a political system that long denied poverty came to embed it within federal policy reporting.
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by Sybille Münch
This article examines how assisted voluntary return (AVR) policies diffuse across European and national contexts, focusing on Germany within the multi-level governance system of the European Union. Developing an interpretive, mechanism-based account of policy diffusion, author Sybille Münch argues that understanding how policies travel requires close attention to how actors construct meaning, rather than relying solely on abstract diffusion models.
Moving beyond single diffusion mechanisms
Policy diffusion research often seeks to identify a dominant mechanism—such as learning, emulation, or competition—to explain how policies spread. Münch instead proposes a more fine-grained approach, drawing on interpretive process tracing and the concept of complex causal mechanisms. These mechanisms operate as sequences of actor-driven actions and interpretations, rather than as singular explanatory forces.
This approach challenges assumptions that policies are simply transferred intact between contexts. Rather, policies are actively interpreted, adapted, and sometimes contested as they move across governance levels.
Continue readingGuest edited by Hilde van Meegdenburg, Sandra Plumer & Johanna Kuhlmann
We are excited to publish this introductory article to a new themed section on Interpretive Process Tracing (IPT). This article lays out the conceptual and methodological foundations for a growing strand of policy research, while also making a substantial standalone contribution to debates on causal mechanisms and process tracing. In doing so, it both frames the research articles in the themed section and advances IPT as a coherent research approach in its own right.
The article begins from a familiar starting point: the increasing prominence of process tracing (PT) in policy research, particularly as a tool for uncovering causal mechanisms—the “cogs and wheels” linking causes to outcomes. However, the authors identify an important tension. Much existing PT adopts a regularity-oriented, moderately positivist stance, assuming that mechanisms generate recurring patterns and can be studied through relatively objective observation. This sits uneasily with interpretive traditions in policy studies, which emphasise context, contingency, and the situated meanings actors attach to policy processes.
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