So sánh phương pháp

	Path Dependence Analysis	Historical Process Tracing
Lĩnh vực	Historical Institutionalism	Historical Institutionalism
Họ	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Năm ra đời	2000	2005
Người khởi xướng	Paul Pierson	Alexander George and Andrew Bennett
Loại	causal-framework	causal-framework
Công trình gốc	Pierson, P. (2000). Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics. American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251-267.	George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262572224
Tên gọi khác	Increasing-returns analysis, Self-reinforcing sequence analysis, Institutional lock-in analysis, Historical lock-in study	Causal-process tracing, Within-case mechanism tracing, Historical mechanism analysis, Causal-process observation method
Liên quan	3	3
Tóm tắt	Path dependence analysis explains why history matters by showing how early, sometimes accidental events set in motion self-reinforcing processes that lock in particular institutional or policy trajectories. Drawing on the economics of increasing returns and elaborated for political science by Paul Pierson and for comparative-historical sociology by James Mahoney, the approach holds that once a society starts down a track, the relative costs of reversal rise over time, so that the same initial conditions could have produced very different stable outcomes. Small contingent choices at a formative moment become amplified by positive feedback, learning effects, coordination, adaptive expectations, and sunk investments, until alternatives that were once feasible become prohibitively expensive. The method directs analysts to identify the contingent origin, specify the concrete mechanisms of reproduction, and demonstrate the increasing returns that make a path durable. It thereby converts the loose intuition that the past constrains the present into a disciplined account of temporally ordered, self-reinforcing causation.	Historical process tracing is a within-case method for establishing causation by following a hypothesized mechanism step by step through the sequence of events that links a cause to an outcome. Systematized for the social sciences by Alexander George and Andrew Bennett and refined by James Mahoney, the approach treats history not as a source of correlations across cases but as a chain of intervening steps whose presence or absence can confirm or refute rival explanations. Instead of asking whether a cause covaries with an outcome across many units, process tracing asks whether the connecting mechanism actually operated in the case at hand, examining diagnostic pieces of evidence, causal-process observations, against the predictions of competing hypotheses. Drawing on the logic of Bayesian updating and on tests such as the hoop test and the smoking-gun test, it offers a disciplined way to leverage rich qualitative detail for strong causal inference in single cases and small comparisons typical of historical institutionalism.