Advancing the Development of Interpretive Process Tracing within Public Policy Research

Inspired by a general turn towards mechanism-based explanations in the social sciences, public policy scholars have increasingly acknowledged the importance of identifying causal mechanisms to study the powering and puzzling of policy making. To analyze public policy from a causal mechanistic angle, process tracing has been found to be the method for qualitative and case-based investigations. Current literature, however, mostly focuses on a variant of process tracing which implicitly inherits a variable-based understanding of social inquiry and thereby sets quantitative standards for qualitative research. While this approach does without doubts have its merits, we argue that qualitative-interpretive approaches that take actors, their perceptions and interpretations as point of departure for explaining societal or political processes face limitations when applying this particular perspective of process tracing. For this reason, scholars have started to develop an interpretive variant of process tracing, called Interpretive Process Tracing (IPT). With its roots in international relations, public policy scholars have only recently begun to engage with IPT. Against this backdrop, the paper seeks to contribute to a refined theoretical and methodological understanding of IPT and highlights its usefulness for public policy research. The paper serves as an introduction to a special issue on IPT.