Over the past century, think tanks have become a driving force on the American political landscape. These nonprofit 501(c)(3) research bodies gather experts and political activists, shape political agendas, sketch out policy proposals, and increasingly provide staff members for incoming administrations and members of Congress. Given their growing importance, it is not surprising that think tanks are getting more attention lately, as we have seen with the hew and cry about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's policy recommendations. For more than four decades, Heritage has been putting out policy books in presidential election years, building on its successful Mandate for Leadership in 1980, which influenced the Reagan administration.
Given the increasing importance of think tanks, political scientist E.J. Fagan has found them worthy of academic study. In The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics, Fagan explores the history of these institutions and their—in his opinion—adverse impact on our politics.
According to Fagan, the fall came in three stages. First, there was "a neutral technocratic regime" that developed "to help provide policy expertise to a growing federal government." This was followed by a second stage, "a robust reactionary conservative regime that was created in the 1970s in response to concerns about the role of expertise that they associated with the now-grown federal government." Then, there is our current era, in which "a smaller progressive knowledge regime" came about "in part as a response to the conservative regime."
As a result of these two competing regimes, the "neutral technocratic regime" was pushed aside. This led to increasing polarization in the development of policy and in our society writ large.
In Fagan's telling, political life was better in stage one, when places like the Brookings Institution lacked competitors as they informed government officials about policy options. He believes that "nonpartisan, technocratic think tanks" filled a gap that existed before World War II, in which "the federal government lacked much of the policymaking capacity necessary to design and implement the New Deal." Those think tanks, in contrast to the current crop, "were able to build consensus based on their reputations for scientific rigor and policy advice unbiased by self-interest." In that period, America was "historically unpolarized and characterized by high levels of bipartisan consensus." This bipartisan consensus, however, had an impact, as it meant that "the expansion of the federal government agenda continued at the same pace under both Republican and Democratic administrations."
Conservatives had a problem with this "neutral" knowledge regime and started to create policy-developing institutions of their own. Fagan focuses especially on the creation of Heritage in 1973, as it was specifically built in reaction to a perception that the existing knowledge regime was not working for conservatives—as Fagan puts it, "conservatives watched the federal government continue to grow and grow." In fact, Heritage's famous origin story is that it came to be in the wake of some congressional aides' frustration with the American Enterprise Institute for putting out a study on an issue after Congress had decided on the issue. AEI made the decision because it did not want to influence the vote. Heritage's founding ethos was that it very much wanted to influence the votes and wanted to do so in a conservative direction. To Heritage, AEI was part of the existing "neutral" regime, one that led to what conservatives saw as decidedly non-neutral results, most notably the continuous expansion and encroachment of the federal government.
Once Heritage emerged, other think tanks followed, and places like AEI also began to interact more with Washington leaders and agency officials. Both think tanks influenced policymaking in the Reagan administration—with Heritage's Mandate for Leadership becoming a guide for many of President Reagan's policy changes.
Liberals took note of this success. They responded, creating more ideological think tanks of their own. This included the Center for American Progress (CAP), which explicitly modeled itself on Heritage's structure. CAP was also pugnacious, and partisan as well. It created a 501(c)(4) political action committee, something that Heritage then followed. Fagan also reports that in 2008, CAP president Neera Tanden punched the editor of CAP's blog for putting Hillary Clinton in an uncomfortable position by asking about her vote in favor of the Iraq war. Tanden now heads President Joe Biden's White House Domestic Policy Council. She was initially nominated to head the Office of Management and Budget but could not get confirmed by the Senate because of her virulent criticism of Republican senators on her Twitter feed.
As a result of all these developments, Fagan finds "a very strong empirical link between partisan think tanks and polarization over time." Here, he particularly calls out Heritage, writing that "the growth of the Heritage Foundation closely matches the trend in polarization." Fagan is not willing to go so far as to say that partisan think tanks caused the rift, noting that "if the Heritage Foundation and its imitators were never established, American politics would likely still be more polarized today than in 1973." Still, they are not blameless, as he finds partisan think tanks as "instrumental to increasing and accelerating the polarization of American political parties."
Fagan fills the book with a host of graphs, tables, and charts that will be every nerd's delight. If you want data on the distribution of white papers by topic or growth of think-tank staff compared with congressional staff, then this is the book for you.
I was, however, disturbed by one glaring absence in Fagan's analysis: It is certainly true that the 1970s and '80s saw a surge in the development of conservative think tanks. Nevertheless, there remains the larger question of where the scholars at these new think tanks came from. Over this period, the very "neutral" universities that Fagan lauds became increasingly inhospitable to conservatives, forcing academic experts to go elsewhere to do scholarly work. Many of the scholars who led the rise of the conservative think tanks were refugees from a liberal-dominated and increasingly hostile environment. This critical context deserves more attention in this academic but highly readable survey of America's think tanks.
The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics
by E.J. Fagan
Oxford University Press, 216 pp., $29.95
Tevi Troy is a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former senior White House aide. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including the forthcoming The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.