About

Kathleen Thelen is a professor associated with the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT. The provided page text does not include specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions. Therefore, a detailed biography cannot be extracted from the given information.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Political economy
• Law
• Gender studies
• Business
• Economic system
• Marketing
• Geography
• Demography
• Market economy
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Cloud Capitalism and the AI Transition

  Politics & Society · 2025-12-26 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This article explores the origins and implications of a new cloud business model that is powering the advance of AI. We document how this model emerged within a handful of the most dominant IT firms whose reach into all corners of the economy makes them a powerful node or “choke point” in the political economy as a whole. We then elaborate how the features of the cloud business model differ from the traditional platform model out of which it grew, as it evolved from asset-light to asset-heavy, from hierarchical organization to semivertical integration, from domination over to collaboration with partner firms, and from embracing consumer- to enterprise-facing strategies. A final section considers the technological, political, and distributional impacts of the rise of this new business model—showing how the current race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) has reinforced and accelerated its underlying dynamics (above all, intensifying the drive for scale and ever-greater asset intensity), analyzing the new techno-nationalist alliance between industry leaders and the state that the model's development has inspired, and considering the new power-distributional dynamics this model has produced.

  PublisherDOI

• Off-Balance: How US Courts Privilege Conservative Policy Outcomes

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-02-06 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author

  A growing literature has challenged some of the more influential accounts regarding the role of courts in the development of social and economic policy in the United States. We highlight some of the more durable features of the American federal judiciary that together tend to privilege ideologically conservative outcomes on matters of politics and public policy. Situating the United States in a comparative perspective, we build our argument in three parts. First, we review interdisciplinary accounts documenting how institutional features of US courts—including the unusually strong powers of judicial review—can tilt outcomes in a conservative-leaning direction. Second, we document how these formidable powers interact with judicial selection processes that currently skew the composition of the judiciary in favor of conservative candidates. Third, we show how the combination of the two factors—institutional and compositional—biases federal courts’ interventions toward privileging conservative policy outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Arrangers and orchestrators: the diverging role of the state in Danish and German vocational education and training

  Socio-Economic Review · 2024-03-21 · 10 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This article compares the changing role of the state in initial vocational education and training (VET) in Germany and Denmark. Scholars have argued that collectivist VET systems face a stark choice between erosion through dualization or state take-over that crowds out decentralized cooperation by firms. Yet, recent work suggests that the state can revitalize the traditional firm-based system of VET through so-called state ‘orchestration’ and soft measures promoting inclusive training. Comparing Germany to Denmark, we argue that there is a second path to revitalization when the state acts as an ‘arranger’, more heavily involved in the provision and governance of VET, and using it for second-chance education. Unlike orchestration, arrangement is only possible where the state itself has achieved some independent capacity in training. We trace this divergence to small policy choices in the 1970s that have had large downstream effects on state capacity and power relations with business.

  PublisherDOI

• In Memoriam: Sven Steinmo

  Political Science Today · 2024-11-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Her scholarly work, particularly her seven co-authored books with her late husband, ranged in topics from elite public opinion formation, the organization and funding of nonprofits, to the efficacy of different adoption laws-which captured the breadth of her interests and expertise.Althea's most prominent political and intellectual legacy includes her

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coordination Rights, Competition Law and Varieties of Capitalism

  Comparative Political Studies · 2024-07-18 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Competition law is a constitutive institution in capitalist markets, establishing the rules for when interfirm coordination is allowed and where competition is required (Paul, 2020). Yet comparativists have spent decades debating the varieties of capitalism framework—which places the issue of coordination at the center of the distinction between capitalist types—while paying virtually no attention to cross-national variation in antitrust rules. This article develops an original theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between competition law and the organization of capitalism. We go beyond the usual binaries (coordinated vs. liberal market economies, “restrictive” vs. “permissive” antitrust regimes) to disentangle two dimensions of the law that fundamentally shape patterns of coordination and competition both across regulatory jurisdictions and over time. Applying our framework to analyze the evolution of American and European competition law, we show how a comparative coordination rights framework can be used to conceptualize key institutional changes within contemporary capitalist systems.

  PublisherDOI

• Brandeis in Brussels: Regulated Competition and Economic Coordination in the European Union

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Brandeis in <scp>Brussels</scp>? Bureaucratic discretion, social learning, and the development of regulated competition in the <scp>European Union</scp>

  Regulation & Governance · 2023-12-09 · 31 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Neo‐Brandeisian legal scholars have recently revived the ideas of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who championed state regulation that preserved market competition and economic liberty in the face of concentrated private power. Yet ultimately and perhaps paradoxically, it has been Europe and not the United States that has proved more hospitable to accommodating key features of the Brandeisian approach. We explain this outcome by tracing the evolution of EU competition law to gain insight into the social learning processes through which such regimes change over time. We argue that the EU's administrative system, which provides the European Commission with significant bureaucratic discretion, has facilitated processes of ongoing deliberative adjustment to policy and practice, which over time has resulted in a system of “regulated competition” with striking similarities to the Brandeisian vision. The analysis highlights how administrative law institutions condition how regulatory regimes evolve in response to acquired experience and knowledge.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Employer Influence in Vocational Education and Training

  2022-09-29 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Abstract The advent of the new ‘knowledge economy’ poses significant new challenges to vocational education and training systems in Europe. Firms are confronted simultaneously with two problems: the need to augment traditional occupational skills with the more general education workers increasingly need in order to keep pace with rapid technological change, while at the same time counteracting the drift on the part of youth away from vocational training towards more academic tracks. This chapter explores employer responses to this dilemma in Germany and Sweden. Germany’s firm-based vocational training system is heavily oriented towards the acquisition of practical vocational skills, leaving advanced firms in particular with deficits in the more general theoretical skills that are increasingly prominent in the new knowledge economy. Sweden’s school-based system, conversely, has traditionally been stronger in the provision of general education at the upper-secondary level, leaving manufacturing firms short of the more practical skills on which they continue to rely. Comparing these ‘contrasting contexts’, the chapter identifies a shared trend towards the growing involvement of employers in public educational institutions—in Germany at the level of higher education as a way of augmenting the country’s heavily practical VET with more theoretical content, and in Sweden at the upper-secondary level to inject a practical component into school-based training in order to strengthen the connection to local firms. In both cases, changes are occurring less through outright reform of traditional educational institutions and more in a process of institutional layering.

  PublisherDOI

• In Memoriam: Frances McCall Rosenbluth

  Political Science Today · 2022-02-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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• The American Political Economy Confronts COVID-19

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-11-11 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  As this group met in Cambridge in late February 2020 to discuss revised chapters for this project, we did not know that a COVID-19 super-spreader event was unfolding less than three miles away – ironically, at the conference of a major bio-technology firm. By October, estimates suggested that the strains unleashed at that single event might have infected 300,000 Americans (Wines and Harmon 2020). Well before then, of course, it was clear that a world-historical calamity was unfolding before us.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sheri Berman

  64 shared

• Tarek Masoud

  64 shared

• Kathleen Thelen Is Ford

  University of Iowa

  64 shared

• Sara McLaughlin Mitchell

  University of Iowa

  64 shared

• Luis Ricardo Fraga

  64 shared

• Christopher Gelpi

  The Ohio State University

  64 shared

• Paul Gronke

  Reed College

  39 shared

• Kenneth J. Meier

  Cardiff University

  38 shared

Awards & honors

• Nobel Laureates: 11
• Pulitzer Prize winners: 6
• Guggenheim Fellows: 54
• John Bates Clark Medal winners: 15
• MacArthur Fellows: 20