Karen Orren

Karen Orren (born 1942) 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.

Orren graduated with a B.A. from Stanford University, majoring in anthropology and political science.

She then attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, completing her M.A. in political science in 1965 and her PhD degree in 1972.

Her doctoral dissertation examined life insurance politics in Illinois.

Orren is a professor of political science at UCLA, where she has taught since 1969.

Orren's research considers political questions in broader historical settings and in the context of institutional change.

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.

Orren has often collaborated with Stephen Skowronek, including founding the academic journal Studies in American Political Development in 1986, and co-authoring the books The Search for American Political Development (2004) and The Policy State: An American Predicament (2017).

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.

In recent years, Orren has increasingly focused on the study of the U.S. Constitution.

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.

In 1993, Belated Feudalism won the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in politics and history, awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA).

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.

In 1998, Orren won the Franklin L. Burdette Award for the best paper presented at the previous year's APSA annual meeting.

In 2006, she was selected to deliver the UCLA Faculty Research Lecture, an honor reserved for "the university's most distinguished scholars."

In 2018, she co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the United States Constitution.