Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT and Permanent External Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Her work focuses on the origins and evolution of political-economic institutions in the rich democracies. She is the author, most recently, of Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (2014). Her current work focuses on the political economy of new technologies and the American political economy in comparative perspective.