VPT: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come

This has been a difficult review to write. On the one hand, it is important to be constructive and open to new approaches for how to do good process tracing (PT). On the other hand, the proposed “Veil of ignorance Process Tracing” (VPT) attempts to solve one vaguely defined problem through a confused mismatch of ideas that result in a set of much bigger problems. Building on my experiences both as a practitioner of multiple PT case studies (Beach, Schäfer, and Smeets 2019; Beach and Smeets 2020), and a methodologist who has published whole chapters detailing how to guard against confirmation bias (see e.g., Beach and Pedersen 2019), my diagnosis of VPT is that there are a series of highly problematic (and puzzling) theoretical, methodological, and practical issues that make for a recipe producing poorly-evidenced empirical generalizations as to why an event took place that will not result in a real contribution to our broader understanding of how causal processes work in real-world cases