The Gladys M. Kammerer Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best book published during the previous calendar year in the field of U.S. national policy.
Citation from the Award Committee:
In Attention Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy, Kathleen Thelen brings attention to the politics of consumption, a neglected element of American and comparative political economy. Spanning two centuries of political contestation, legal maneuvering, and institutional transformation, Attention Shoppers! traces the conditions under which low-cost retail giants like Sears, Walmart, and Amazon ascended to market dominance in the US. Thelen draws on contrasts with European political economies, showing why the American consumer model diverged so sharply from its counterparts abroad.
Thelen’s wide ranging analysis unpacks the interplay between legislators, courts, retailers, and consumers. She shows how political and economic power has long shaped the policy context of retail capitalism, generating a “bitter equilibrium” in the US consisting of low margins and low wages that exacerbate economic inequality and undermine labor power. Attention Shoppers! reframes how scholars should think about the relationship between governance, competition, and inequality in contemporary capitalism.
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 in Cologne, Germany. A co-founder and co-organizer of the Consortium on the American Political Economy (CAPE), her work focuses on the political economy of the rich democracies, with an emphasis on the study of American capitalism in comparative perspective. She is currently at work, with Jingtian Chen and Morgan Gillespie, on a book on corporate power in American courts. Thelen’s previous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Friedrich Schiedel-Award for Politics & Technology, the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize, the Michael Endres Research Prize, the Barrington Moore Book Prize, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, the Mattei Dogan Award for Comparative Research, and the Max Planck Research Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. She holds honorary degrees from the Free University of Amsterdam, the London School of Economics, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Copenhagen. Thelen has served as President of the American Political Science Association, Chair of the Council for European Studies, and President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Martin Gilens (Chair) of the University of California, Los Angeles, Sarah Binder of George Washington University, and Mark A. Peterson of the University of California, Los Angeles