Karen Orren is an American political scientist, noted for her research on American political institutions and social movements, analyzed in historical perspective, and for helping to stimulate the study of American political development.
Education
Orren graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University, majoring in anthropology and political science. She then attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, completing her Master of Arts in political science in 1965 and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1972. In her first book, Corporate Power and Social Change (1974), she studied corporate investment in housing over a century to illuminate the range of possible authority relations between government and business and account for the prevailing form.
Career
Her doctoral dissertation examined life insurance politics in Illinois. Orren is a professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles, where she has taught since 1969. Orren’s research considers political questions in broader historical settings and in the context of institutional change.
In Belated Feudalism (1991), Orren overturned the Hartzian proposition that American history is characterized by the "absence of feudalism," through an investigation of the labor movement’s prolonged confrontation with ancient master-and-servant laws.
Orren has often collaborated with Stephen Skowronek, including founding the academic journal Studies in American Political Development in 1986, and writing the book The Search for American Political Development (2004). Through their work, Orren and Skowronek have significantly fostered the growth of American political development (or APD) as a distinct subfield within the discipline of political science.
Politics
Orren was president of the Politics and History Section of APSA for 1995–1996 and from 2007 to 2009 was a co-editor of the American Political Science Review. American Political Science Review 70(3): 723–741. American Political Science Review 89(2): 377–388.
