Kathleen Thelen

Kathleen Thelen is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), and a faculty associate at the Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University.

She is known for her research on political-economic institutions, as well as her frameworks for understanding institutional stability and change. She is influential in the field of historical institutionalism.