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Many methodological publications have addressed the subject of process tracing, including its ontological and epistemological foundations, and sought to define and systematize its use. The existing literature provides many different definitions of process tracing. In this article, we shall review these different approaches with a view to outlining their shared features and elaborating a typology of the various uses of process tracing. Process tracing can be wielded to uncover causal mechanisms, or test out causal mechanisms that had hitherto remained purely theoretical. Two main types of uses are identified in this article: inductive uses (which nonetheless remain “guided“ by theory), and deductive uses (which may nevertheless always be used to further nuance the theories being tested). In the field of comparative political economics, process tracing studies allow researchers to better understand how interests and institutions change over time.