Kathleen Thelen

Payson S. Wild Professor in Political Science
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1987
thelen@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Please send correspondence to:
Department of Political Science
Northwestern University
Scott Hall - 601 University Place
Evanston, IL 60208-1006

Kathleen Thelen is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is also a Permanent External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany; Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, U.K.; and Affiliated Visiting Professor at the International Center for Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.

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. 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, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, French, and German.

Thelen has received awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Society, 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 is president of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section on Politics and History and president-elect of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). 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 on the editorial board of the Cambridge University Press Series in Comparative Politics and the boards of several journals, including World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, PS: Political Science & Politics, Governance, Industrielle Beziehungen, Political Science Quarterly, 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 Scientific Advisory Board 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.

Recent and Current Projects

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 crossnational 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 framework for understanding institutional evolution through incremental change. This book was featured in an invited "author meets critics" panel at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Coordination as a Political Problem in Coordinated Market Economies. This project is concerned with the impact of recent pressures associated with globalization and the rise of the service sector on the institutional arrangements governing labor relations in the so-called coordinated market economies in Western Europe and Japan. In addition to a broad comparative analysis, the book examines in detail developments in three countries (Denmark, Germany and Japan) over the past 30 years in four realms: labor market and welfare state institutions, industrial relations, vocational education and training, and corporate governance. The project inquires into the political and market dynamics that sustain (or undermine) employer coordination in three distinct varieties of "coordinated" market economies.

Selected Publications

Books

Streeck, Wolfgang, and Kathleen Thelen, eds. Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies. 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).

Thelen, Kathleen, with Sven Steinmo and Frank Longstreth, eds. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge University Press (1992).

Thelen, Kathleen, Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany. Cornell University Press (1991).

Selected Recent Articles and Chapters

Thelen, K. Skill formation and training. Forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Business and History, ed. G. Jones and J. Zeitlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thelen, K., with I. Kume. 2006. Coordination as a political problem in coordinated market economies. Governance 19(1): 11-42. A Japanese translation appeared in the political science journal Revaiasan (“Leviathan”).

Thelen, K. 2006. Institutions and social change. In Crafting and Operating Institutions, ed. I, Shapiro and S, Skowronek. New York: New York University Press.

Thelen, K., with C. van Wijnbergen. 2003. The paradox of globalization: Labor relations in Germany and beyond. Comparative Political Studies 36(8): 859-80.

Thelen, K. 2003. How institutions evolve: Insights from comparative-historical analysis. In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. J. Mahoney and D. Rueschemeyer, 208-40. New York: Cambridge University Press. A French translation of the article, Comment les institutions évoluent : perspectives de l'analyse comparative historique, appeared in L'Année de la régulation 7.

Thelen, K. 2002. The political economy of business and labor in the developed democracies: Agency and structure in historical-institutional perspective. In Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. I. Katznelson and H. Milner, 371-97. New York and Washington, D.C.: W.W. Norton and American Political Science Association.

Thelen, K. 2001. Varieties of labor politics in the developed democracies. In Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, ed. P. Hall and D. Soskice, 71-103. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thelen, K. 2000. Timing and temporality in the analysis of institutional evolution and change. Studies in American Political Development 14:102-109.

Thelen, K., with I. Kume. 1999. The effects of globalization on labor revisited: Lessons from Germany and Japan. Politics and Society 27(4): 476-504.

Thelen, K. 1999. Historical institutionalism in comparative politics. Annual Review of Political Science 2:369-404. A Russian translation of the article appeared in Oikoumene (Ukraine).