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 chang...