Process tracing has a great (but largely untapped) potential in sociological and comparative education policy analysis. Process-tracing (PT) can be defined as an analytical strategy aimed explicitly at unearthing the process behind an outcome of interest and identifying its causal mechanisms (George & Bennett, 2005). A distinct feature of PT is its reliance on fine-grained descriptions and the concern for sequencing of events; that is, a preoccupation for the unfolding of a given phenomenon over time (Collier, 2011). Process-tracing analysis aims at reconstructing key sequences of events within a given case with the purpose of identifying the causal mechanisms shaping it. As we argue in this presentation, PT can contribute to sociological and comparative education policy analysis in different ways. Hence, PT can both “ameliorate the limitations” of the conventional approach to comparative analysis (i.e., the method of agreement and difference) and contribute to expanding the range of questions we can ask (Simmons & Smith, 2021; see also George & Bennett, 2005). By examining in detail the factors leading to a particular policy outcome, including actors’ rationales, interests, and decision-making processes, PT can help identify causal mechanisms shaping education policy processes, helping to build theory in the field of comparative policy analysis. It can be used to compare policy-making processes across different regulatory and professional regimes, and thus test hypotheses on the contextual factors that shape policy outcomes. Indeed, if long policy periods are considered, PT allows for a more nuanced understanding of the role of context and contingency in policy-making, as it allows researchers to examine the conditions under which a policy was adopted, implemented and revisited through feedback loops. Our empirical examples include country cases conducted in the context of REFORMED, a multi-year research project analysing the instrumentation and enactment of school autonomy with accountability reforms in multiple educational settings (www.reformedproject.eu). The project relied on a case-centric variant of PT (Beach & Pedersen, 2016) that does not lend itself to generalization or extrapolation purposes, but suggests certain patterns and regularities have great potential from a comparative analysis perspective. The review of the REFORMED case studies will allow us to examine the potential of PT for theory-building and theory-testing purposes in comparative education research, but also to reflect on the challenges posed by the need to translate PT principles into methodological strategies, and the compatibility of PT with the methodological and theoretical pluralism inherent to comparative education policy studies.

Beach, D. & Pedersen, R.B. (2016). Causal case study methods. Foundations and guidelines for comparing, matching, and tracing. University of Michigan Press. Collier, D. (2011). Understanding process tracing. Political Science & Politics, 44(4), 823–830. George, A.L., & Bennet, A. (2005). Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. MIT Press. Simmons, E.S., & Smith, N.R. (Eds.). (2021). Rethinking comparison. Cambridge University Press.