Studying Causal Mechanisms Using In-Depth Case Studies (QMMR)
Half Day Short Course | Register here
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA
9:00 am – 1:00 pm
The study of causal mechanisms (aka causal processes) is ubiquitous in the social sciences. The promise of mechanism-focused research using in-depth case studies is that we can gain a better understanding of how things work and under what conditions using actual cases instead of using controlled comparisons across cases (for example experimentally manipulating treatments to gain knowledge about mean causal effects). However, the potential gains of mechanism-focused research have not been fully reaped in the social sciences because of the tendency to reduce causal processes to simple one-liners (aka intervening variables), but that do not unpack the details of the chain of interaction going on in a case that links causes and outcomes together (e.g. that grievances are linked to democratization through social mobilization). By not unpacking process theoretically in more granular detail, we are less able to evidence how processes work because empirical material is only processual/mechanistic evidence when we can identify the theorized part of a process that it is evidence of.
Inspired by the mechanistic turns in fields such as medicine, policy evaluation and policy studies, the first session of the course discusses what ’good’ processual/mechanistic explanations can look like in the social sciences. The course introduces a conceptual language of episodic theorization inspired by work in fields like biology and medicine; which attempts to capture the causal structure of a process through making explicit what causal roles interactions between actors play in different phases of a process. While the particularities of processes as they play out in individual cases will always be case-specific, cross-case processual comparisons are made possible through the analytical simplification in the form of theorizing the episodes and their causal role that make up the causal structure. The final session discusses practical applications, including what and how we can ‘generalize’ from processual case studies, and how process-focused research can be used as an adjunct method to improve social science experiments in designing the experiment and interpreting the data.
- APSA Annual Meeting Pre-conference Short Courses are half- or full-day events that offer diverse professional development opportunities and allow attendees to connect with scholars from various backgrounds. This year’s pre-conference short courses will be held on Wednesday, September 2, 2026, in Boston, Massachusetts. Sponsored by APSA Organized Sections, Related Groups, and other affiliated organizations. All short courses require pre-registration to attend.
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