Think Tanks in America

Expert advice is gaining importance in advanced-knowledge societies. The demand for scientific knowledge increases as political decision-makers look for answers to cope with the ever more complex challenges of a globalised world. At the same time, scientific evidence has become a strategic resource capable of justifying world-views and political positions. Against this background, the ‘global spread’ of think tanks seems to respond to this growing demand for scientific expertise. Defining what a think tank is, let alone what they do and if they are able to effectively shape political ideas, is still a controversial issue. This contribution outlines a conceptual framework for analysing the strategies of different types of think tanks in distinct institutional environments. Starting with classical typologies to distinguish between organisations, those which adhere to standards of scientific inquiry at one end of a continuum and ideologically biased institutes at the other, the analytical model takes into account distinct ‘points of intervention’ and systematically considers the respective institutional and ideological environment. The first dimension allows for distinguishing between distinct effects of political ideas: They can influence decision-making as concepts in the foreground or as underlying assumptions in the background of policy debates. At the cognitive level, they can function either as programmes (foreground), serving as policy prescriptions for the political elite necessary to formulate actual agendas, or as paradigms (background). Considering different ‘knowledge regimes’ permits to test the influence of respective institutional and normative settings and simultaneously assess the assumptions and convictions underlying these models and typologies.

What to Think about Think Tanks - Towards a Conceptual Framework of Strategic Think Tank Behavior

More than ever before, analysts in government have access to policy-relevant research and advocacy, which they consume and apply in their role in the policy process. Academics have historically occupied a privileged position of authority and legitimacy, but some argue this is changing with the rapid growth of think tanks and research-based advocacy organizations. This article documents the findings from a randomized controlled survey experiment using policy analysts from the British Columbia provincial government in Canada to systematically test the source effects of policy research in two subject areas: minimum wage and income-splitting tax policy. Subjects were asked to read research summaries of these topics and then assess the credibility of each article, but for half of the survey respondents the affiliation/authorship of the content was randomly reassigned. The experimental findings lend evidence to the hypothesis that academic research is perceived to be substantially more credible than think tank or advocacy organization research, regardless of its content. That increasingly externalized policy advice systems are not a pluralistic arena of policy research and advice, but instead subject to powerful heuristics that bureaucrats use to sift through policy-relevant information and advice, demands added nuance to both location and content-based policy advisory system models.

Who Do Bureaucrats Believe? A Randomized Controlled Experiment Testing Perceptions of Credibility of Policy Research

ABSTRACT Social impact bonds (SIBs) are a social policy model for privately financing social programs on an outcomes basis. Like other social and development policy trends of the last decade, the construction of SIBs has been characterised by a global circulatory infrastructure that has seen them emerge in upwards of 30 countries. In this article, we interrogate the dynamics of the SIB ‘policy world’ that has enabled that mobility. We build a novel dialogue between the theoretical frameworks of ‘policy mobilities’ and ‘policy knowledge networks’. We argue that the lack of engagement with the internal dynamics of networks is a missed opportunity for political economy and policy mobilities approaches. As such, we employ a novel form of social network analysis, examining the ties of collaboration and advice between the authors of SIB policy texts and the organisations that they are embedded in. We find that SIB texts were authored by a disconnected community that rarely collaborated across organisational or jurisdictional borders. Knowledge production in the SIB world was uneven, as places and actors with ‘good knowledge’ were repeatedly engaged. We conclude that the financialisation of global social policy that SIBs impel is constructed through hierarchies of space and place.

Networks of knowledge production and mobility in the world of social impact bonds

Les difficultés associées à la définition du terme « think tank » compliquent les efforts pour les dénombrer et les échantillonner, alors que les tentatives de les définir de manière plus précise s’appuient souvent sur des distinctions arbitraires. Ces difficultés sont aussi liées à des ambiguïtés fondamentales concernant la nature des rôles politique, scientifique et technocratique de ces organisations. Cet article compare quatre organismes canadiens (le Centre Mowat, l’Institut Parkland, le Centre Manning et l’Institut Broadbent) dans l’optique de faire apparaître les dimensions qui gouvernent la constitution du think tank comme type social. L’approche fut d’examiner des cas aux marges de la figure du think tank afin d’évaluer l’hypothèse selon laquelle la tendance d’un organisme à jongler avec les logiques de différents champs (ici universitaire et politique) ou à être absorbé dans la logique d’un seul champ module sa volonté et sa capacité d’adopter l’identité du think tank. Les résultats suggèrent une association entre l’arrimage à la catégorie culturelle du think tank et la capacité d’un organisme à maintenir un double engagement, parfois fort délicat, envers la recherche et l’action sans se fondre dans l’un ou l’autre de ces domaines. Ils suggèrent qu’une attention portée aux paramètres de variation de ces organisations puisse guider la formulation de critères d’échantillonnage systématiques. Ils portent aussi appui à l’idée que la posture hybride privilégiée par les think tanks comporte des avantages stratégiques pour agir dans différentes arènes d’action publique. 

Aux marges de la recherche et de la politique : la nature et les limites de la figure du think tank

Building on Bourdieu’s Field Theory and on Thomas Medvetz’s study of American think tanks, this article introduces the concept of modalities of integration to examine how a selection of three Canad...

Julien Landry

Papers

Grounding the political spectrum: how three Canadian think tanks integrate social space