James Mahoney is a professor of political science and sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (2001), which received the Barrington Moore Jr. Prize of the Comparative and Historical Section of the American Sociological Association. He is also coeditor of Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which received the Giovanni Sartori Book Award of the Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association. His most recent book is Colonialism and Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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 change, including, most recently, Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency and Power (Cambridge, 2010, co-edited with James Mahoney) and Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (2005, co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck). Thelen has held appointments as a research fellow or visiting professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialpolitik, the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Nuffield College (Oxford), Sciences Po (Paris), and the Copenhagen Business School, among others. She has served as Chair of the Council for European Studies (2002 6) and as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2008 9). Currently, she is President of the APSA organized section for Comparative Politics. In 2009 Thelen was elected to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin.