The Veil of ignorance Process Tracing (VPT) Methodology: Some Practical Considerations and Limitations (to Decoupling)

With the introduction of their new approach to process tracing (PT), Copestake, Goertz, and Haggard seek to tackle what is arguably the most prevalent and most serious shortcoming in qualitative case study research: the “cherry-picking” of cases, data sources, or evidence to fit the claim or theory that the researcher is trying to substantiate. The authors should also be complimented for their attempt to make process tracing analyses “more rigorous and transparent” (this issue). By now, we have a variety of handbooks that offer high quality, hands-on advice on how to set up and conduct a process tracing analysis (see e.g., Beach and Pedersen 2019; Bennett and Checkel 2014). However, the term “process tracing” is still being stretched by scholars, who essentially provide us with a narrative reconstruction of a (causal) process. The question “how valid are my causal inferences compared to the inferences of others?” remains central to process tracing analyses. And we should welcome attempts to further develop the methodology of causal attribution, specifically for within-case analyses, in which we deal with one or a few instances of a cause-and-effect relationship