This event brought together two leading US political scientists to discuss how globalisation, economic inequality and democratic erosions are reshaping American political life.
Drawing on their new volume, The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen laid out a comparatively informed framework for understanding how business power, union decline, racial inequity, government weakness and regional disparities are impacting contemporary American politics and policy.
Paul Pierson is the John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of American Democracy and Co-Director of the multi-university Program on American Political Economy. His research focuses on American political economy and public policy. He is author or co-author of six books, including Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, with Jacob Hacker.
Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT and a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Her work centers on the origins, evolution, and contemporary political economies of the rich democracies. She is the author of Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity. Her awards include the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics & Technology (2021) and the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize (2019).
Peter Trubowitz (@ptrubowitz) is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Phelan US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House.
This event was held on 15 November 2021. This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.
Header image: "nyc pandemic 4-6-14" by Dan DeLuca is licensed under CC BY 2.0