Process tracing is a familiar analytical tool in a number of sciences.Successful process tracing pulls together what is already known, believed or assumed and the various events, activities and entities in a case study in order to construct a narrative of the case. Several chapters in this volume offer accounts of narrative science that are explored through process tracing. These examples are analysed to reveal how various aspects of process tracing inform narrative and how narrative, in turn, aids process tracing in an iterative process of interpretation and reinterpretation of evidence, testing, development and revision of hypotheses, and the explanation of singular events.

This chapter presents the case for employing Bayesianism as a universal, unified framework for inference that narrows the divide between qualitative versus quantitative data, within-case versus cross-case analysis, and observational versus experimental research. It offers a Bayesian critique of various other approaches to qualitative methods and multi-method research.

Andrew Bennett help us think about what steps are necessary to use case studies to identify causal relationships and draw contingent generalizations. He suggests that case study research employs Bayesian logic rather than frequentist logic. “Bayesian logic treats probabilities as degrees of belief in alternative explanations, and it updates initial degrees of belief (called ‘priors’) by using assessments of the probative value of new evidence vis-à-vis alternative explanations (the updated degree of belief is known as the ‘posterior’).” Bennett sketches four approaches: generalization from ‘typical’ cases, generalization from most- or least-likely cases, mechanism-based generalization, and typological theorizing, with special attention to the last two. The study of deviant, or outlier, cases and cases that have high values on the independent variable of interest (theory of change) may prove helpful, Bennett suggests, aiding the identification of scope conditions, new explanations, and omitted variables.

In Chapter 3, I propose three causal mechanisms to explain the normative transformations I investigate: convention reorientation, technological revision, and network synthesis. These capture the causal role played by processes of discursive contestation, technical development, and bureaucratic politics. Crucially, I propose that these mechanisms interweave, in an arrangement of reciprocal reinforcement. I also propose a three-stage analytical process for analysing cases such as the ones in this book: de-reification, attributing agency, and tracing transactions. This process allows investigators to ‘break down’ supposed norms into their constitutive and unfolding relations, locate sources of transformative power, and trace how that power operated to

produce a change. I contextualise both the mechanisms and the analytical method with reference to relational sociology, practice theory, and scholarship on institutions.

In Chapter 2, we review prior work on scale, discuss obstacles to reaching inferences about the causal role of scale, and lay out our own approach to this difficult question. After surveying extent work on community size and related subjects, we discuss the concept of a political community, which may be of several sorts and of any size. In the third section, we lay out the measurement of community scale, explaining that we transform population from a linear measure into a logarithmic measure. In the fourth section, we consider the difficulty of treating scale as a causal factor. This is a complicated issue, given that the population of political communities is a slow-moving cause, not directly manipulable, and rarely subject to as-if random perturbations. As such, it falls far from the gold standard of experimental research designs. The fifth section lays out the modeling strategies employed in quantitative analyses to follow. The sixth section discusses various outcomes of theoretical interest, and the final section introduces the data sources that we rely on to measure right- and left-side variables.

This concluding chapter pulls together the material of this book into a more synoptic account. We begin by clarifying the aims of our book, highlighting that our approach poses steep challenges but also offers important payoffs. We proceed by summarizing the findings presented in previous chapters, discussing the causality of scale effects and the dimensions along which scale matters. We then offer a tentative theoretical synthesis that ties together many of the themes introduced in previous chapters. Next, we evaluate the implications of scale for big topics like governance, democracy, and freedom, where we identify a series of recalcitrant trade-offs. These concern efficiency (preferences versus policies), political relationships (informal/personal versus formal/institutional), systems of rule (intensive versus extensive), models of popular rule (participatory versus competitive), power (individual versus collective), and freedom (where trade-offs are conditional on structural features of the landscape). In the final section, we discuss the relevance of scale for current policy debates, looking specifically at the effect of boundaries between polities, changes in electoral laws, levels of government in a polity, and suffrage rights.

This chapter summarizes the major theoretical contributions and empirical findings of the book. It restates the causal mechanisms through which Turkish and French states changed their policies toward Christian and Muslim minorities, respectively. Finally, it discusses how the analysis of the interaction between international context and domestic actors can contribute to scholarship on the study of religion and politics in general, and religious freedoms in particular.