Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity

Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Permanent External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. She is the author, among other books, of How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, and winner of the Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research. She also writes extensively on historical institutionalism and theories of institutional change, including, most recently, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power (Cambridge, 2010, co-edited with James Mahoney) and Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (2005, co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck). Thelen has held appointments as a research fellow or visiting professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialpolitik, the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Nuffield College (Oxford), Sciences Po (Paris), and the Copenhagen Business School, among others. She has served as Chair of the Council for European Studies (2002-6) and as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2008-9). Currently, she is President of the APSA organized section for Comparative Politics. In 2009 Thelen was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin.

• 1. Varieties of liberalization and the new politics of social solidarity; 2. Industrial relations institutions; 3. Vocational education and training; 4. Labor market policy; 5. Coalitional realignments and institutional change; 6. The future of egalitarian capitalism, in light of its past.

"As union membership and the manufacturing sector have shrunk, the institutions built around them have become the locus of political conflict over inequality and inclusion in the world’s rich countries. Kathleen Thelen elegantly argues that the course of these struggles hinges on the extent to which unions have succeeded in organizing broad parts of the population, and to which states themselves have the capacity and political will to intervene in conflicts over redistribution. Returning the political coalitions identified by Esping-Andersen to the heart of institutionalist political economy, Thelen’s book is a trenchant statement of the ongoing struggles that lie behind the apparent stability in models of capitalism." Pepper D. Culpepper, European University Institute