Process Tracing Analysis Research Articles

Platform power and regulatory capture in digital governance

Abstract Digital governance is a public concern, yet under private control. After numerous scandals, all stakeholders in the European Union (EU) agreed to establish a “novel constitution for the internet” that would effectively constrain the power of large platforms. Yet the Digital Services Act (DSA) ultimately legitimized and institutionalized their position as the gatekeepers of the internet. Why? We argue that platforms prevailed thanks to their ability as intermediaries to quietly shape the available policy options. Our “platform power mechanism” combines institutional and ideational sources of business power to show how big tech drew on its entrenched position as an indispensable provider of essential services and promulgated the idea of itself as a responsible and neutral intermediary. We follow the unfolding of platform power through a process-tracing analysis of Google and Meta’s activities with respect to DSA legislation from its announcement (2020) to its adoption (2022). Besides contributing a reconceptualization of the DSA as a regulatory capture, we integrate the notion of platform power into a “regulator–intermediary–target” model and demonstrate how gatekeepers have exploited information asymmetries to share “the public space.” Our analysis thus supplements established approaches that have derived regulators’ deference to platforms from the tacit allegiance of consumers.

Globalisation in-Between Homogenisation and Heterogenisation: An Institutionalist Analysis on Türkiye

ABSTRACT While neoliberal globalisation exerts both homogenising and heterogenising forces on a global scale, an excessive emphasis on its homogenising effects can lead to overly optimistic and unrealistic future projections. This study, instead, directs its focus towards the heterogenising impact of neoliberal principles and norms on Türkiye through an institutionalist lens. Beginning with a historical analysis and subsequently conducting an empirical examination using World Values Survey (WVS) data, the research reveals that the divergent evolution of Türkiye and the West created structural differentiation preventing Türkiye’s homogeneous integration into the West. A process tracing analysis spanning from 1990 to 2017 further demonstrates that Türkiye's historically evolved social institutions exhibit resilience against the pressures of neoliberal change, despite its widespread diffusion throughout the country since 1980. As a result, this paper posits that heterogenisation and its inherent unpredictability are destined to shape the future global landscape, challenging the optimistic assumptions of pro-globalisation advocates.

Leadership in EU policy-making: a deep dive into the extension of the EU emissions trading system

ABSTRACT This article offers insights into how leadership can be provided to advance the EU policy-making process through a case study of the policy-making for the new EU emissions trading system for buildings, road transport and additional sectors (ETS-2). Conceptually, it contributes to the literature on leadership in the EU by developing a three-part framework for observing leadership in EU policy-making, focussing on the intentions of an actor, the effects of the actions of an actor and the perceptions of other actors. The article also contributes to the literature on interactions between leaders in EU policy-making. Empirically, we provide a process tracing analysis of leadership in the policy-making process for the ETS-2. Using our framework, we examine five key leadership moments, showing how Denmark provided cognitive leadership, Germany provided exemplary and structural leadership, and the Commission and rotating Presidencies provided cognitive and entrepreneurial leadership. Our empirical analysis shows that various types of leadership were partially simultaneously and partially consecutively provided, with some leaders following up on the leadership strategies of others. We term this dynamic ‘sequential leadership’. Our finding confirms the importance of seeing leadership as a relationship, not just between leaders and followers, but also amongst leaders.

Safeguarding democracy from the outside in: transnational democratic networks against autocratisation in contemporary Brazil

Over the last decade, democracy in Brazil has been under attack. Efforts to protect Brazilian democracy from autocratisation date back to the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and have come to a (temporary) conclusion after Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat in the October 2022 elections. One of the most striking elements of democratic resistance in Brazil has been the establishment of multiple and overlapping transnational networks. Would democracy in Brazil have resisted without international pressure? We resort to a process-tracing analysis to argue that transnational networking strategies were a necessary condition to protect Brazilian democracy, in tandem with the domestic role played by Brazil’s organised civil society and political institutions. These networks have operated (1) to maintain the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) as the main partisan alternative to the far right, represented by Jair Bolsonaro; (2) to preserve the civic spaces necessary to criticise and counter Bolsonaro’s moves to undermine fundamental rights, critical policy areas and democratic institutions; and (3) to increase the costs of attempts to overturn the election results in 2022.

Decabinetisation as a presidentialisation strategy: a process-tracing analysis of the executive state law in Greece

ABSTRACT This paper develops and empirically tests the novel concept of ‘decabinetisation’, a type of depoliticisation reform that affects the advisory and support offices of executive politicians. Reforms that restrict and constrain the work of ministerial advisers and reduce the political resources of ministers are puzzling, even more so when pressure to reform ministerial offices is absent. To understand why governments undermine a system that has been put in place to serve them, this paper investigates the provisions of Law 4622/2019 on the Executive State in Greece, using ‘theory-building process-tracing’ based on data collected from government documents and 23 elite interviews. Initially selected as an extreme case of second-order decabinetisation in the absence of pressure to reform, the study morphed into a more typical case that exemplifies how ministerial office reforms can be the result of strategic forms of presidentialisation. Decabinetisation can be triggered by the Prime Minister’s intention to ‘presidentialise’ the core executive in face of centre-of-government dysfunctionalities; policy entrepreneurs couple the problem and politics stream with the decabinetisation policy; but the reform becomes possible only in the presence of a critical juncture during which the power asymmetry between the head of government and other members of government is big.

Identifying causal mechanisms of unexpected policy change: Accumulated punctuation in the field of lobbying transparency in Germany

AbstractRecent trends toward mechanistic approaches offer a new perspective in understanding policy change and stability. This paper analyzes causal mechanisms leading to unexpected policy change by using punctuated equilibrium theory. As empirical illustration, the paper presents a case study on the introduction of the German mandatory lobbying register in 2021 after a 16‐year‐long debate. Methodologically, the paper employs process tracing and qualitative content analysis to examine policy documents. We identify a combination of three mechanisms: end of a de‐thematization of the policy issue, growing dominance of the issue network favoring stricter transparency regulations, and issue validation through the accumulation of scandals. Thus, policy change results from the descend of policy actors defending the status quo while those advocating for change ascend to an influential position, and actively exploit focusing events as fertile ground for reform. The paper contributes to a refined theoretical understanding of the causal mechanisms of policy change.

Legitimacy versus incentives: Explaining the difference between early and late union responses to nonstandard employment in the Netherlands

With the spread of alternative work arrangements across European labor markets, union responses to nonstandard employment have increasingly received scholarly attention. Based on a process-tracing analysis of the Netherlands between 1971 and 1996, I propose an alternative framework for understanding the divergence between early and late union responses to nonstandard employment. Rather than a choice between cooperation with management or outsiders, this case study shows that trade unions initially faced a dilemma between a legitimacy-based and an incentive-based strategy when nonstandard employment took off. Whereas the first strategy is inherently exclusive, the latter allows for more inclusive union responses. Contrary to the incentive-based strategy, the attractiveness of the legitimacy-based strategy decreases with higher levels of nonstandard employment, explaining why inclusive union responses typically become more dominant over time.

When (and how) ideas become arguments: the regulation of party donations in Germany

Abstract This article aims to explain the deviant German case of an early and comprehensive regulation of party donations (combining a high level of transparency and incentives for small donations). Given the limited explanatory power of economic and institutional factors, the article emphasises the causal role of ideas for a policy stabilisation which occurred after 1993. A process-tracing analysis suggests that the 1983–1993 reform period was characterised by a conflict of ideas. During this conflict, ideas regarding undisclosed donations as an anti-democratic interference with democratic political competition came to prevail over ideas regarding all donations as a necessary condition for democratic competition irrespective of their regulation. The key actors in this conflict were, on the one hand, the new Green party which resuscitated the idea of donations being potentially anti-democratic and, on the other hand, the Constitutional Court which ultimately endorsed this ideational legacy promoted by the Greens. After 1993, donations in Germany came to be accepted as a necessary evil whose anti-democratic potential had to be limited by transparency obligations and incentives for small donations. The findings presented here suggest that policymakers need to link attempts to regulate party donations to ideational legacies (if available) to successfully tackle political corruption.

The COVID-19 pandemic and institutional change in the EU’s financial assistance regime: the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)

ABSTRACT This article aims at explaining the establishment of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) around a new governance system of EU financial assistance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a process tracing analysis and semi-structured elite interviews, the paper shows that between the pandemic outbreak and the adoption of the RRF, an ‘ideational change’ occurred about the financial assistance regime in the EU. Such an ideational change consists in two concomitant phases – a first phase of ‘ideational collapse’ of the existing governance mode (i.e. intergovernmental coordination as per the ESM) and a subsequent phase of ‘ideational consolidation’ around a new governance mechanism (i.e. limited supranational delegation as exemplified by the RRF). Based on the specific case study of the RRF, the paper discusses implications for how institutional change in the EU may take place following an exogenous shock and the relative explanatory power of ideas in determining the final form of institutional change.

Counterproductive evolution: the long-term effects of short-term interventionism following the Great Financial Crisis

Following the 2008 financial crisis, policymakers in advanced economies employed unconventional economic interventions that were meant to be short-term but continued for more than a decade and were followed by unconventional interventions in non-financial markets. What causal mechanisms connect short-term unconventional interventions with long-term policy change? By developing a constructivist-evolutionary framework, we suggest that employing unconventional policy ideas for the sake of securing the pre-crisis growth regime, in a volatile economic environment, has repeatedly failed policymakers’ expectations. The gap between expectations and outcomes expanded the policy space for unconventional policy ideas, and activated an evolutionary process, through which expanding ‘temporary’ interventions have been adopted in additional areas, became hard to reverse and modified macroeconomic priorities. A comparative process-tracing analysis of two case studies – the UK and Israel – demonstrates how short-term employment of innovative policy ideas and long-term change in economic policy are tightly connected via causal ideational evolutionary mechanisms.

Interest groups and the implementation of electronic health records in the Italian NRRP, between policy and politics

ABSTRACT One of the main goals of the Italian National Resilience and Recovery Plan (NRRP) is to modernize the economy and the public sector, including the digitalization of public services. Among the many interventions aimed at achieving this goal, the implementation of a national system of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is both an ambitious and yet overdue objective, having been envisioned for over a decade. Despite the existence of broad agreement on this policy measure, its implementation has turned out to be more challenging than expected, this for constitutional, political and technical reasons. Adopting an interest groups perspective, the aim of this article is to map the positions of the various actors involved in the realization of EHRs in Italy, focusing on the implementation phase of the NRRP, and comparing the two sub-phases corresponding to the different governments in office, namely, the Draghi government (May 2021 – September 2022) and the Meloni government (since October 2022). Having developed a process-tracing analysis, we find that political claims and factors became more salient in the second phase, especially as regards the role of ICT companies in charge of implementing EHRs, despite substantial continuity in terms of policy content.

Where there is smoke, there is fire? Making sense of the past failure and future prospects of cannabis reform in Chile

AbstractA decade ago, cannabis reform was on the public and political agenda in Chile, but the reform process eventually broke down with no marijuana legalization. This article focuses on the different stages of agenda politics to explain the reasons for the failure of cannabis reform in Chile. Drawing on original data, including 36 interviews with key actors, the article traces the reform process. Through a combination of process tracing and counterfactual analysis, the article establishes the causal weight of explanatory factors and distinguishes between activities and their effects. The evidence shows that cannabis reform in Chile failed not only because of a lack of governmental support and agenda setting but also because reform proponents were unable and unwilling to maintain the agenda after initially setting it successfully. By contrast, insider and outsider reform opponents were effective at agenda denial and counter‐framing cannabis reform. Despite producing lots of smoke, recreational cannabis reform efforts have burned out without blazing the trail toward marijuana legalization in Chile. By unearthing the factors that led to initial success in gaining attention and to eventual failure in securing approval in the recent past, this article points out the difficulties of legalizing marijuana in Chile in the near future.

Surges vs. Waves: Presidents, Popularity, and the Diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America

ABSTRACTConditional cash transfers (CCTs) are a striking case of policy diffusion in Latin America. Almost all countries in the region adopted the model within one decade. While most theories of diffusion focus on the international transference of ideas, this article explains that surge of adoptions by analyzing presidents’ expectations. Out of all ideas transmitted into a country, only a few find their way into enactment and implementation, and the executive has a key role in selecting which ones. Policies expected to boost presidents’ popularity grab their attention. They rapidly enact and implement these models. A process-tracing analysis comparing CCTs and public-private partnerships (PPPs) shows that presidents fast-tracked CCTs hoping for an increase in popular support. Adoptions of PPPs, however, followed normal procedures and careful deliberations because the policy was not expected to quickly affect popularity—which, in the aggregate, leads to a slower diffusion wave.

Social identities in conflict: Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews

AbstractThe Israeli–Palestinian conflict is generally referred as a territorial conflict, but it is also a conflict over the preservation of identity. This study analyzes the relations of Jews and Palestinians in Israel from an identity security perspective. It sheds light on how the communities perceive actions, discourses, and symbols as a mutual threat to their own identity. Adapting the concept of societal security dilemma (SSD), this study seeks to reveal the patterns of feeling insecure between the groups and to put forth the measures and countermeasures taken to secure identity. This approach contends that the measures and countermeasures taken to reduce the perception of threat do not lead to a feeling of security; on the contrary, it creates a cycle of constant threat perception, making the groups feel more insecure in terms of identity. I argue that this is the case for the Jews and Palestinians in Israel. The analytical dimensions of SSD are applied to the case via process tracing and historical analysis. However, I identify a gap unaddressed by these dimensions of the concept. The present study proposes an additional dimension—confrontation—to fill this gap.

The Black pill pipeline: A process-tracing analysis of the Incel’s continuum of violent radicalization

Incels represent a subculture born on the Internet and unified by their inability to establish and maintain sexual relationships with women. When new members enter, they are placed at the beginning of a subcultural process that uses their shared experience to introduce them to increasingly radical viewpoints. In order to analyze Incel subculture, this research uses a purposive sample of on-line discussion boards of Incel culture and traces the subcultural process of radicalization. Findings suggest that Incels use a series of increasingly radical “pills” to denote their position within the subculture and move new and prospective members along an ever increasing pipeline of extremism resulting in both advocating for and approval of violence.

Regulating the platform giants: Building and governing China's online economy

AbstractThe online platform economy in China has grown to become one of the largest in the world. Its growth has contributed to China's economic development and played an important role in its innovation path. We present a three‐stage structured explanation of China's governance approaches toward its homegrown platform firms. Using Chinese government documents and secondary sources to conduct a historical process tracing analysis, we argue that the growth of China's main platform firms and the government's governance of them was co‐evolutionary, guided by the party‐state's goals of maintaining social‐political stability, economic growth and strengthening technological self‐sufficiency. By so doing this paper addresses the fundamental question of how a “strong” and “capable” state such as China's has responded as platform firms went from providing various online services to becoming core infrastructure in the economy and society to the point of threatening core government objectives.

Activists in international courts: Backlash, funding, and strategy in international legal mobilization

Activists in international courts: Backlash, funding, and strategy in international legal mobilization

Supranational security states for national security problems: governing by rules & capacities in tech-driven security spaces

ABSTRACT Despite inherent political tensions, supranational institutions are increasingly involved in national security. EU institutions not only guide but also mobilize national resources or directly produce collective security. To make sense of those variations, the article conceptualizes ideal types of ‘supranational security states’ and develops a typological theory for understanding the emergence of the studied states. Based on policy documents and secondary sources, the article conducts a case-centric process-tracing analysis of three decades of EU reforms in (1) export control over dual-use technologies, (2) network and information security and (3) border security. Three types of supranational security states emerge, driven by their path-dependency logics and response to crises. Findings suggest a more nuanced understanding of security policy instruments and the dynamics of political authority in shared security spaces, contributing to debates on the positive and regulatory European security state, technology-driven security governance, and the coherence of the EU as a security actor.

Fame and factions: A process-tracing analysis of the 2019 leadership selection process in the Belgian French-speaking liberal party (MR)

This study applies process-tracing methods to understand the 2019 leadership selection process in the Belgian French-speaking liberal party, MR, which is the oldest and second largest party in French-speaking Belgium. We triangulate a variety of sources to assemble a rich qualitative material that is used to contrast the formal rules and outcome of the race to the actual process. We show that the gatekeepers were not the ones ascribed in the statutes, that formal rules were bent to fit the profile of the race, and that the very nature of the race was much closer to a coronation than the results may suggest. We also uncover mechanisms through which party actors, especially the incumbent leader as steering agent, informally influence the process to the desired outcome, with the race being played prior to the validation of the candidacies. This analysis puts focuses onwhenandhowkey actors use their informal influence to weigh the process and influence the outcome of leadership races.

Combining process tracing and synthetic control method: Bridging two ways of making causal inference in evaluation research

This article discusses potential ways of combining two methods of evaluation in single-case studies: the synthetic control method and the process tracing method. Both are designed to examine certain events/programmes that take place in given cases but view these events/programmes from different causal perspectives. Seeing an event/programme as a cause, synthetic control estimates its impact on one or more outcomes. Conversely, starting from a certain outcome, process tracing uncovers the causes responsible. One can start from the causal explanation reached via one of the two methods and then proceed to examine that explanation through the other method. Once the causes of an outcome are traced via a process tracing analysis, that account can be validated by estimating the effects of those causes via synthetic control. Equally, once the impact of a certain event is estimated through synthetic control, causal mechanisms traceable via process tracing can be exploited to refine that impact evaluation.