Department Seminar: Tracing how Europe works – using process tracing in practice

Case studies are one of the most prominent forms of research used by scholars of the European Union (EU).

Case studies do more than measure case scores on causal and contextual conditions and outcomes. Instead, they hold the promise of learning about how EU policy processes work by unpacking what is going on within cases through the investigation of processes linking causes and outcomes together in some form of causal relationship. However, how can we ever learn anything more ‘general’ about how the EU works from studying individual cases? In this talk, Derek Beach will discuss how complex EU cases can be studied in ways that avoid the extremes of one-size-fits-all abstract theories or idiographic empirical descriptions.