This book examines contemporary changes in labor market institutions in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, focusing on developments in three arenas - industrial relations, vocational education and training, and labor market policy. While confirming a broad, shared liberalizing trend, it finds that there are in fact distinct varieties of liberalization associated with very different distributive outcomes. Most scholarship equates liberal capitalism with inequality and coordinated capitalism with higher levels of social solidarity. However, this study explains why the institutions of coordinated capitalism and egalitarian capitalism coincided and complemented one another in the "Golden Era" of postwar development in the 1950s and 1960s, and why they no longer do so. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study reveals that the successful defense of the institutions traditionally associated with coordinated capitalism has often been a recipe for increased inequality due to declining coverage and dualization. Conversely, it argues that some forms of labor market liberalization are perfectly compatible with continued high levels of social solidarity and indeed may be necessary to sustain it.

Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT. Her work focuses on the origins and evolution of political-economic institutions in the rich democracies. Her latest works are Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (Cambridge University Press 2014) and Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis (co-edited with James Mahoney, forthcoming 2015). Previous publications include Explaining Institutional Change (2010), Beyond Continuity (2005), and How Institutions Evolve (2004). Her awards include the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the APSR (2005), the Mattei Dogan Award for Comparative Research (2006), and the Max Planck Research Award (2003). She was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (2009), and received an honorary degree at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (2013).

Thelen serves on the APSA Executive Council as Association Treasurer. She was President of APSA’s Comparative Politics Section (2011-13), Chair of the Council for European Studies (2002-2006), President of the APSA Section on Politics and History (2007-2008), as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2008-2009). She is General Editor, along with Eric Wibbels, for the Cambridge University Press Series in Comparative Politics, and a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Cologne, Germany.