Kathleen Thelen is a Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT. She is also a Permanent External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, U.K. In 2009 she was elected to the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Thelen is the Vice President (President-Elect) of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. She co-chairs the Harvard-MIT Joint Seminar on Comparative Historical Analysis.
Thelen studies the origins, development, and effects of institutional arrangements that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism” across the developed democracies. Her most recent single-authored book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge University Press 2004), was selected as winner of the 2006 Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research (based at Yale University), for the “best book published in 2004-05”, and as co-winner of the 2005 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association for “the best book on government, politics, or international affairs” published in 2004. A subsequent book, Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck (Oxford University Press, 2005), explores the evolution of a range of political-institutional institutions in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. Together with James Mahoney, Thelen recently completed an edited volume, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which provides a new framework for understanding incremental forms of institutional change.
Thelen is currently at work on project entitled “The Future of Egalitarian Capitalism, in Light of its Past” that addresses contemporary possibilities for egalitarian capitalism in the rich democracies in comparative and historical perspective. The project uses cross-national comparison and historical analysis to identify the political-coalitional foundations on which egalitarian capitalism has traditionally rested, and to explore the forces that sustain or undermine solidarity in the current context. Thelen’s articles have appeared in World Politics, Governance, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Studies in American Political Development, Politics & Society, and Journal of Japanese Studies among others. Her work has been translated and published in Chinese, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, French, and German.
Thelen has received awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Society, the Social Science Research Foundation (Abe Foundation Fellowship), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Scheduled Fellow), Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City, Society for Comparative Research, National Science Foundation, Science Center in Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), Robert Bosch Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American-Scandinavian Foundation, and Friedrich Ebert Foundation among others.
Thelen recently completed a term as president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE), and just prior to that, as president of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section on Politics and History. From 2002 to 2006 she served as chair of the Executive Committee of the Council for European Studies based at Columbia University. She has also been a member of the executive boards of the American Political Science Association's organized sections in Comparative Politics, European Politics and Society, and Qualitative Methods. Thelen currently serves as an Assistant General Editor for the Cambridge University Press Series “Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics,” and the boards of several journals, including among others The American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Governance, Industrielle Beziehungen, and Economic and Industrial Democracy (Stockholm). She is an appointed member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Center of Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), and of the Scientific Committee of the Research Unit on European Governance (Unità di Recerca sulla Governance Europea) of the Collegio Carlo Alberto Foundation of Moncalieri in Turin, Italy.
 |
Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (edited with James Mahoney) Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009. This book provides a new historical-institutional framework for explaining incremental forms of institutional change. Drawing on contributions that explore a wide range of substantive outcomes across diverse empirical settings, the introduction offers new propositions about the connections among specific types of institutions, strategies for change, and modes of gradual institutional transformation.
How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan, Cambridge University Press (2004). Winner of the 2006 Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research for the “best book published in the field of comparative research in 2004-05, and co-winner of the 2005 American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for "the best book published in the United States during the previous year on government, politics or international affairs."
The institutional arrangements governing skill formation are widely seen as constituting a key element in the institutional constellations that define distinctive “varieties of capitalism” across the developed democracies. This book explores the origins and evolution of such institutions in four countries—Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. It traces cross-national differences in contemporary training regimes back to the 19th century, and specifically to the character of the political settlement achieved among employers in skill-intensive industries, artisans, and early trade unions. The book also tracks evolution and change in training institutions over a century of development. It uncovers important continuities through putative "break points" in history, but also—and more importantly, perhaps—provides insights into modes of institutional change that are incremental but cumulatively transformative. The study underscores the limits of the most prominent approaches to institutional change and identifies the political processes through which the form and functions of institutions can be radically reconfigured over time.
 |
Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, Oxford University Press (2005). This volume, edited together with Professor Wolfgang Streeck, was based on a conference convened in December 2002 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne. The contributions focus on contemporary changes in welfare state institutions in the developed democracies (Europe, United States, and Japan). The introductory chapter, co-authored with Streeck, draws on these contributions and on a broader literature on institutions and institutional change to develop a typology of diverse modes and mechanisms of incremental change. This book was featured in an invited "author meets critics" panel at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
The Future of Egalitarian Capitalism, in Light of its Past. This project addresses contemporary possibilities for egalitarian capitalism in comparative and historical perspective. The book will be divided into three sections, each delving successively deeper into the political-coalitional foundations that have traditionally supported egalitarian capitalism in order to capture the forces that are holding it together and those that are pulling it apart. Part I examines developments across five countries – Germany, Japan, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands – that have moved along different trajectories since the 1990s, with some more prone to tendencies toward growing inequality (“dualism”) than others. It argues that the strength of dualism can be traced back to the coalitional politics and specifically to the role and preferences of manufacturing interests relative to other actors in the political economy.
This coalitional analysis sets the stage for an examination of the “root causes” of dualism —Parts II and III of the book. Most analyses of dualism focus, not unreasonably, on the politics in the period of austerity, scarcely venturing back before about 1980. By contrast, I will argue that the “tracks” were set for divergent political outcomes already during the so-called Golden Era of postwar capitalism in the 1960s, in particular, different policies to address to labor market shortages in this period as well as divergent responses to union demands for industrial democracy.
Part III of the book extends the temporal canvas further back in time. Historical analysis has shown that labor strength and employer organization do not stand in a zero-sum relationship to one another but in fact go hand-in-hand. While a high degree of employer coordination is clearly not sufficient to generate egalitarian outcomes, coordination on the employer side appears to be very useful and perhaps even necessary to sustaining high levels of social solidarity. This part of the book, then, tackles the question of what allows coordinated capitalism to take on a more egalitarian form. Against a comparative backdrop in which Japan and Sweden are the main points of reference, this section focuses special attention on Germany, tracing the creation and ongoing transformation of key labor-market institutions through several phases in German history over the past century in order to gain insight into the possibilities for survival and adaptation of these institutions in the present crisis.
Books
Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (co-edited with James Mahoney). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck). Oxford University Press (2005).
Thelen, Kathleen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, Japan and the United States. Cambridge University Press (2004).
Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (co-edited Sven Steinmo and Frank Longstreth). Cambridge University Press (1992).
Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany. Cornell University Press (1991).
Selected Recent Articles and Chapters
“Institutionalizing Dualism: Complementarities and Change in France and Germany,” (co-authored with Bruno Palier), Politics & Society (March 2010).
“Economic Regulation and Social Solidarity: Conceptual and Analytic Innovations in the Study of Advanced Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review (October 2009), 1-21.
“Beyond Comparative Statics: Historical Institutional Approaches to Stability and Change in the Political Economy of Labor,” Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis (forthcoming 2010).
“Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 47: 3 (September 2009), 471-498.
“Institutional Change in Varieties of Capitalism” (co-authored with Peter A. Hall), Socio-Economic Review, 7: 1 (January 2009), 7-34.
“The State and Coordinated Capitalism: Contributions of the Public Sector to Social Solidarity in Post-Industrial Societies,” (co-authored with Cathie Jo Martin), World Politics 60 (October 2007), 1-36.
“Contemporary Challenges to the German Vocational Training System,” Regulation and Governance 1: 3 (September 2007), 247-260.
“Coordination as a Political Problem in Coordinated Market Economies,” (co-authored with Ikuo Kume), Governance 19: 1 (January 2006): 11-42. Translated and published in Japan in Leviathan Vol. 37 (2005).
"The Paradox of Globalization: Labor Relations in Germany and Beyond," (co-authored with Christa van Wijnbergen), Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 36, No. 8 (October 2003): 859-880.
“How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative-Historical Analysis,” in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Translated and published as: “Comment les institutions évoluent: perspectives de l’analyse comparative historique,” L'Année de la régulation, vol. 7, October 2003.
“The Political Economy of Business and Labor in the Developed Democracies: Agency and Structure in Historical-Institutional Perspective,” in Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (W.W. Norton and American Political Science Association: New York and Washington, D.C., 2002).
“Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 2 (Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, Inc., 1999). Translated and republished in Russian in Oikoumene (Ukraine), and selected for inclusion in the volume, Comparative Political Science (ed. Alan S. Zuckerman), part of a four-volume series, “SAGE Library of Political Science” (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009).
