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This article examines the phenomenon of regulatory capture, using the regulation of pharmaceuticals as its case study. We shall examine an empirical situation where quantitative data is available for a large sample, and where the objective is identifying causal mechanisms through an in-depth analysis of a smaller number of cases. We shall elaborate a Bayesian framework for process tracing which we shall then use to examine the development of two agencies, located in France and England respectively. This approach shall allow us to identify a number of institutional dependencies which would have otherwise been difficult to detect through an initial statistical analysis. These dependencies provide a better explanation for the design of the regulatory schemes under study than the capture argument.