Prof. Kathleen Thelen

Professor 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.