Supporters of think tanks say they have a enormous influence in the public policy marketplace. But the fact is that their stardom is not as important as they should. Many people know nothing about the world of think tanks. Even they are not able to explain the meaning of the cryptic word.

However, the phenomenon may have a certain importance as it is receiving increasing attention. Journalists, public officials, public affairs agencies and policy entrepreneurs follow  more a more the life and works of these political institutions. But from an academic perspective, we lack enough research in order to define and explain the real role of think tanks, with a deeper purpose than describing the job of the big organizations, like the Broookings Institution, RAND Corporation, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute or their European counterparts.

In the nineties and early years of the 21st century several seminal books and research papers were published. Scholars from political science suddenly discovered that they were new channels for spreading Western public policies across the world. The new lines have been extended since the Second World War but specially after the end of Communism (There is an interesting research topic on think tanks as a tool for public diplomacy). As a result, think tanks emerged as an attractive matter in the academic agendas. But after the first wave of publications, it seems the area is not strongly growing. Every year one of two books and no more of a dozen of serious papers are issued, but they represent little variation over the original research. They are mainly descriptive and comparative works which do not add new ideas or interpretation about this political actor. We have also the hagiographic accounts written by think tank ‘scholars’ and tellers who do not offer an independent analysis on the issue.

For these reasons, we have to trust the only regular research about the evolution of think tanks in the world, based on a simple quantitative and qualitative investigation conducted by James McGann, who is the author of books like Think Tanks and Civil Societies, one of the main references of the discipline. I am talking about the 2012 Global Go To Think Tanks Report and Policy Advice, which represents the best and rare account of the current situation of think tanks in the world. I will comment the report in the next post.