Process Tracing with Causal Models

We connect the literature on causal models to qualitative inference strategies used in process tracing. The chapter outlines a procedure for drawing case-level causal inferences from a causal model and within-case evidence. We also show how a key result from the causal-models literature provides a condition for when the observation of a node in a causal model (a “clue”) may be (or certainly will not be) informative, and we extract a set of implications for process-tracing methods.