Process Tracing

Andrew Bennett is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is also President of the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods, which sponsors the annual Institute on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research at Syracuse University. He is the co-author, with Alexander L. George, of Case Studies and Theory Development (2005), which won the Giovanni Sartori Prize in 2005 for the best book on qualitative methods. Jeffrey T. Checkel is Professor of International Studies and Simons Chair in International Law and Human Security at Simon Fraser University. He is also a Global Research Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He has published extensively in leading European and North American journals, and is the author of Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (1997), editor of International Institutions and Socialization in Europe (Cambridge, 2007), co-editor (with Peter J. Katzenstein) of European Identity (Cambridge, 2009), and editor of Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge, 2013).

• Preface; Part I. Introduction: 1. Process tracing: from philosophical roots to best practices Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel; Part II. Process Tracing in Action: 2. Process tracing the effects of ideas Alan M. Jacobs; 3. Mechanisms, process, and the study of international institutions Jeffrey T. Checkel; 4. Efficient process tracing: analyzing the causal mechanisms of European integration Frank Schimmelfennig; 5. What makes process tracing good? Causal mechanisms, causal inference, and the completeness standard in comparative politics David Waldner; 6. Explaining the Cold War's end: process tracing all the way down? Matthew Evangelista; 7. Process tracing, causal inference, and civil war Jason Lyall; Part III. Extensions, Controversies, and Conclusions: 8. Improving process tracing: the case of multi-method research Thad Dunning; 9. Practice tracing Vincent Pouliot; 10. Beyond metaphors: standards, theory, and the 'where next' for process tracing Jeffrey T. Checkel and Andrew Bennett; Appendix. Disciplining our conjectures: systematizing process tracing with Bayesian analysis.

'Bennett and Checkel have assembled an impressive group of scholars on the cutting-edge methodological issues involved in process tracing, while at the same time providing concrete, practical advice for scholars who wish to use this technique of analysis in a variety of different research programs. As a result of this dual approach, this volume represents a steep change from earlier methodological studies on process tracing and fills a real gap in scholarship. There is no doubt that it will be compulsory reading on graduate-level courses in qualitative methodology for a long time to come.' Giovanni Capoccia, University of Oxford