Although having been practised in the Social Sciences for decades, it was only in recent years that process tracing has gained prominence in methodological debates in political science. In spite of its popularity, however, there has been little success in formalising its methodology, defining its standards, and identifying its range of applicability. This symposium aims at furthering our understanding of the methodology by discussing four essential aspects: the underlying notion of causality, the role of theory, the problem of measurement in qualitative research, and the methodology's relationship with other forms of qualitative inquiry. It brings together methodological and substantive articles by young European scholars and summarises a round-table discussion with Peter A. Hall held at a workshop at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, in November 2010.

The questions address the possibilities of a methodology to capture the temporal unfolding of events, which is an aspect difficult to model in statistical analysis but at the core of ambition of process tracing. Peter Hall is encouraged to present his view on the relevance of the study of causal mechanisms in the social sciences.

The questions address the ontological and epistemological implications of taking the ‘mechanismic’ view of causal mechanisms seriously, suggesting that they are more than events or series of intervening variables. Peter Hall is asked his views on the nature of causal mechanisms, and the logics of inference that we can use to study them in within-case analysis.

In recent years, Comparative Historical Analysis (CHA) has been developed as a methodological apparatus that is distinct from quantitative research in many respects. While this is correct, it is less apparent to what extent CHA is different from and adds something to the tools and techniques known from ordinary case study research (i.e., not tied to Historical Institutionalism). As a researcher who is attached to CHA, Peter Hall is invited to elaborate on this approach.

Building on a Lakatosian approach that sees Social Science as an endeavour that confronts rival theories with systematic empirical observations, this article responds to probing questions that have been raised about the appropriate ways in which to conduct systematic process analysis and comparative enquiry. It explores varieties of process tracing, the role of interpretation in case studies, and the relationship between process tracing and comparative historical analysis.

A fit between theory and method is essential in theory – guided empirical research. Achieving such a fit in process tracing is less straightforward than it may seem at first glance. There are two different types of processes that one can theorise and, consequently, two varieties of process tracing. The two varieties are introduced by empirical examples and distinguished with respect to four characteristics. Failure to determine the form of process tracing at hand may lead to invalid causal inferences.

How should small-n researchers aggregate the information collected during their research in an effort to measure the relevant theoretical concepts with high levels of validity and reliability? This article specifically focuses on the method of triangulation, which is frequently used in process-tracing approaches. We introduce and theorise different aggregation strategies commonly used in triangulation, such as weighted and simple averages or ‘the winner takes it all’ strategy. We then evaluate their performance with regard to their proneness to measurement error using computer simulations. Our simulation results show that averaging different information sources, in general, outperforms other aggregation strategies. However, this is not the case if poorly informed sources are biased in a similar direction; in these situations the ‘winner takes it all’ strategy shows a superior performance.

This article argues that process tracing provides a useful, although underestimated, avenue for empirically testing deductive game theoretical arguments. In-depth case analysis allows for a systematic evaluation of the crucial assumptions underlying the models and for making internally valid measurements of the model's core concepts. Furthermore, process tracing enables the researcher to overcome the weak conceptions of processes encountered in many game theoretic arguments. After outlining the usefulness of combining deductive game theory and process tracing, as well as discussing the limits of such an approach, the article illustrates the argument with an example from substantive research on civil–military relations in new democracies.

This article argues that process tracing is a viable and suitable methodological alternative to probe the implications of formal models specifying how the dynamics of belief formation may systematically cause bargaining failures under uncertainty. I illustrate the argument with a brief case study of the failure of the European Defence Community in postwar Europe.

This article recalls a distinction between research designs that focus on either the ‘causes of effects’ or the ‘effects of causes’ and compares it to a related but not identical distinction between the aims of developing and testing theoretical explanations. Using a study on environmental policy-making in the European Union as an example, the roles of process tracing and cross-case analysis in different combinations of these categories are highlighted.

In this article I compare the results of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) applied to a medium-sized data set on women's legislative representation in Asian and Latin American countries to those of regression analysis based on the same data set. I find that both methods are suboptimal. Explaining the outcome of high women's representation, fsQCA suggests complex configurations of conditions with low empirical coverage and high sensitivity to coding. While, not without shortcomings, OLS regression analysis performs somewhat better than fsQCA. On the one hand, this method identifies two statistically significant and substantively relevant variables (i.e. quota rules and communist regimes), which strongly increase the percentage of women deputies. On the other hand, the model's interpretation is not completely clear cut, as scholars may disagree over the relevance of the one marginally statistically and substantively significant variable, the longevity of democracy.

Feedback practices have recently come under increasing scrutiny in British Universities, most notably because of the impact of the National Student Survey. This article draws on the work of a National Teaching Fellowship Scheme funded project (‘It's Good to Talk: Feedback, Dialogue and Learning’.) that seeks to identify, evaluate, develop and promote ways to improve feedback to students within the discipline of Politics. The article contends that student dissatisfaction with assignment feedback, coupled with increased pressures on teaching time, calls for a new approach to feedback delivery in the teaching of Politics. At the centre of this is the issue of encouraging lecturer and student dialogue around learning by developing peer feedback. This means moving away from a ‘transmission’ approach to feedback to techniques that involve discussion and reflection. In this article, we consider the literature on one approach by focusing on student-to-student peer feedback. Through an exploration of the literature, we argue that it offers an effective way to support student learning.

This article examines the ‘lessons’ from the most recent Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research in political science that appears in three North American academic journals. The article focuses on the literature that examines the effectiveness of ‘active learning’ classroom techniques. Although the most commonly used technique to promote active learning is the in-class simulation, the evidence on the effectiveness of simulations is decidedly mixed. The article continues by exploring other available, but often ignored, active learning classroom techniques.

This article offers a new empirical perspective on the state of Comparative Politics (CP) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We present findings on the authors, methods, and epistemology of CP publications in the most relevant journals from eleven countries in the region. The major finding is that CP is rather marginal in CEE Political Science. Furthermore, CP articles predominantly focus on the authors’ country of origin, use off-the-shelf data, apply mostly qualitative data analysis techniques, and rarely take a historical perspective.