G. Capano, M. Howlett, M. Ramesh, and A. Virani, Making Policies Work. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019. doi: 10.4337/9781788118194.

Unobserved analytical constructs that provide hypothetical links between observable events: ‘a social mechanism is a plausible hypothesis, or set of plausible hypotheses, that could be the explanation of some social phenomenon; the explanation begins in terms of interactions between individuals, or between individuals and some social aggregate’ (Schelling, 1998, p. 32)