FACULTY | Kathleen Thelen
Biography | Research | Publications | Subjects
Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT, 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. Currently President-Elect of the Comparative Politics Section of the APSA, Thelen also served as Chair of the Council for European Studies (2002-2006), as President of the APSA Organized Section on Politics and History (2007-2008), and as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2008-2009). She is Assistant General Editor for the Cambridge University Press Series in Comparative Politics, and an appointed member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and of the Board of Trustees of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. In 2009 Thelen was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. She currently serves on the steering committee of the Center for European Studies at Harvard and co-chairs the Boston Area Research Workshop on History, Institutions and Politics.
Biography | Research | Publications | Subjects
Research
Thelen studies the origins, development, and effects of institutional arrangements that define distinctive "varieties of capitalism" across the developed democracies. Focusing especially on the "coordinated market economies" of northern Europe, her work uses cross-national comparison and historical analysis to identify the political-coalitional foundations on which different models of capitalism are founded, and to explain divergent trajectories of institutional development. Her most recent book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge), was selected as winner of the 2006 Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research and co-winner of the 2005 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the APSA.
Thelen is also a prominent contributor to the literature on historical institutionalism. Her current work in this area focuses on issues of institutional change. Two recent volumes, Explaining Institutional Change (Cambridge 2010, with James Mahoney) and Beyond Continuity (Oxford 2005, with Wolfgang Streeck) critique dominant punctuated equilibrium models of change and provide an alternative historical-institutional framework for explaining modes of political change that are incremental but cumulatively transformative.
Biography | Research | Publications | Subjects
Recent Publications
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: Oxford University Press, 2005.
How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
"Institutionalizing Dualism: Complementarities and Change in France and Germany," (co-authored with Bruno Palier), Politics & Society 38: 1 (March 2010), 119-148.
"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 (2010)
Biography | Research | Publications | Subjects
Subjects
17.951 Institutionalism and Institutional Change
17.156 Welfare and Capitalism in Western Europe
17.561 European Politics
17.906 Varieties of Capitalism and Inequality
