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This article presents a critical overview of the state of research on the Europeanization of national parliaments and executives. We start from the assumption that patterns of governance as well as developments relevant to democratic theory can only be grasped comprehensively if parliamentary studies and research on public administrations are interlinked. Even though both strands of research have witnessed considerable empirical progress over the last decade, most studies still limit themselves either on the parliamentary or on the administrative side. Considering these ‚traditional' approaches, we review some of the most important outcomes of research on the Europeanization of national parliaments and administrations in a first step. In a second step, we discuss four ‚blind spots', which have so far remained unaddressed in most research agendas: the inclusion of actor-centered variables, executive-legislative interactions, policy-specific comparisons as well as the analysis of different parliamentary functions. We argue that eliminating these blind spots can lead to a deeper understanding of governance patterns in the EU multilevel system and conclude with calling for developing a comprehensive research agenda which takes into account these gaps.

Zusammenfassung: Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) wurde von dem Soziologen Charles C. Ragin als Verbindung von fallorientierten, konfigurativen Ansätzen und mengentheoretischem Denken präsentiert. Mittlerweile hat sich QCA -von Ragin und anderen weiterentwickelt -als mengentheoretischer Ansatz zur Untersuchung sozialer Phänome-ne im sozialwissenschaftlichen Methodenkanon etabliert. Der vorliegende Beitrag zielt darauf ab, Forschungsperspektiven und -potentiale von QCA als (relativ) junge Methode für soziologische Fragestellungen aufzuzeigen. Auf der Grundlage einer Rundschau von 77 publizierten, soziologischen Zeitschriftenartikeln wird einerseits ein breiter Überblick über Anwendungsbereiche, aktuelle Trends und Entwicklungen von QCA in der Soziologie gegeben. Andererseits werden am Beispiel der publizierten Studien die einzelnen Analyseschritte einer QCA besprochen und dabei gängige Fallstricke aufgezeigt, wobei sowohl practiced practices als auch best practices in ihrer Anwendung herausgearbeitet werden.Schlagworte: Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA); fuzzy-set analysis; mengentheoretisches Denken; Evaluation von QCA-Anwendungen; Standards "guter" Praxis. Summary:The sociologist Charles C. Ragin originally introduced Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which combines ideas of case-oriented research, configurational thinking, and set-theoretical logic. Since then -as further developed by Ragin and others -QCA has become an established tool within social science methodology which uses a set-theoretical approach to analyze social phenomena. This paper aims at highlighting perspectives and potentials which QCA as a (relatively) new method is able to offer to address sociological research questions. In order to do so, seventyseven publications in the field of sociology are reviewed. On this basis a broad overview is given regarding applications, trends, and developments of QCA, on the one hand. On the other, crucial steps within QCA are examined and potential pitfalls discussed by exemplifying practiced practices and best practices.