Kathleen Thelen

Thelen was also elected to serve as President of the American Political Science Association (APSA) from 2017 to 2018.

She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2009. She has been awarded honorary degrees at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2013), the London School of Economics (2017), the European University Institute in Florence (2018) and, most recently, the University of Copenhagen (2018).

Thelen left Northwestern University for MIT in 2009. In 2014, she published her third major substantive book, “Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity.” The book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. While confirming a broad, shared, liberalizing trend, Thelen finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, her study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, she argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it. The book received prizes from section in both the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the American Sociological Association (ASA).

In “How Institutions Evolve” (2004), Thelen examines variations in the nineteenth century settlements between employers and skill-intensive workers, artisans, and early trade unions. She finds that the effects of these settlements were incremental, and can only be understood by making sense of specific types of long-run gradual change. For example, she discovered that German Handicraft Protection Law of 1897, originally designed to shore up support among a reactionary artisanal class, was a historical cause of contemporary Germany’s vocational training system. The book co-received the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in 2004 on government, politics, or international affairs.

After moving to Northwestern University in 1994, Thelen wrote a sole-authored article, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” for the Annual Review of Political Science. The article instantly became a classic, and to date scholars have referenced it more than 6,000 times.

Thelen completed and published her first book, “Union of Parts”, as an assistant professor at Princeton University in 1991. Through an analysis of labor relations in Germany between the 1970s and 1980s, she identified the interaction of centralized bargaining and German work councils as the institutional basis for peaceful, negotiated adjustment in the midst of radical economic and political change.