Process Analytics in Political Science: Why, How & Where Next

• In Event: Foundational Concepts and New Directions in Qualitative Research

Abstract

For over 25 years, political science has debated whether and how to put the social world into motion. As a discipline, we have developed philosophical concepts (agent and structure), understandings of causation (causal effects) and methods (regression analysis; causal identification strategies) that give us valuable snapshots of the social world. The problem – or better said, challenge - is that same social world is always in motion. If true, then our job as social scientists is also to be creating motion pictures.

This essay contextualizes then assesses the ever-growing number of processual methods through which we now access and measure those motion pictures. I argue that pluralism at the level of meta-theory opens new conceptual doors and brings to the fore additional methods and designs – what might be called process analytics - for understanding and measuring a social world that is not just there, but also and always coming into being.

The argument proceeds in four steps. First, I sketch how political science – in both positivist/critical-realist and interpretive flavours – has added processual understandings of the social world to its conceptual and methodological toolkits. Second, I argue that it has been a turn to relational ontologies that has made possible and legitimated this processual turn. My contextualization creates a pluralist meta-theoretical space, one that allows for a critical exploration – in the paper’s third section – of the _multiple tools_ available to capture process. These include multi-sited methods from anthropology; following methods from science and technology studies; practice tracing from sociology; and the interpretive-standard-Bayesian process tracing that dominates contemporary political science. When it comes to theorizing and measuring process, it turns out that process tracing is far from the only (method) game in town.

In the conclusion, I argue that political science should expand its current design-method gold standard for advancing the knowledge frontier: experimental design plus causal identification. The standard is not so much wrong as incomplete. If we take our collective, disciplinary foot off the meta-theoretical accelerator, then new designs and methods, coupled to a richer and deeper understanding of process and cause appear. This process analytics will give political scientists a ‘gold plus standard’ for measuring and accessing an increasingly turbulent, coming-into-being social world.

Author

• Jeffrey T. Checkel, European University Institute