Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes.

• Author: Steelman, Aaron
• Position: Book Review

Donald E. Abelson Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, 246 pp.

According to a recent estimate, there are more than 3,000 public-policy institutes--or "think tanks"--around the globe. Yet the literature on these organizations is relatively sparse. One reason, perhaps, is the youth of most think tanks. In 1970, for instance, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Brookings Institution, and the Hoover Institution were doing important work. But the second and third generations of American think tanks--for instance, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Progressive Policy Institute, and countless state-based groups--have been formed in just the past few decades. One would expect, then, a lag in scholarship. After all, one can't write about the think tank "phenomenon" until that phenomenon has actually taken place.

In Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutes., Donald Abelson, a political scientist at the University of Western Ontario, attempts to measure the influence of American and Canadian think tanks. This is a more difficult undertaking than it might sound. Indeed, in his 1993 book The Transformation of American Politics: The New Washington and the Rise of Think Tanks, David Ricci deemed such a project nearly impossible: "When institutes like Brookings and AEI promote ideas, they can never be sure what effect those intangible entities will have on other Washingtonians, no matter how suggestible. While investigating the subject, I looked closely at what think tanks are doing, from books to seminars to briefings to breakfast meetings. I also asked fellows and managers to tell me what results they thought their activities would produce. The more I saw and heard, the more I understood that no one can know precisely what is happening in this drama." Ultimately, Abelson comes to much the same conclusion. While that may be depressing to scholars interested in the topic--and to Abelson himself--this book still yields many interesting observations about the nature of think tanks and the policymaking process more generally.

Abelson attempts to distinguish his own conceptual framework from two classic theories of how political power is wielded: elite theory and pluralist theory. Elite theory, advanced by William Domhoff, Thomas Dye, and others, posits that the political system is dominated by a select group of individuals and organizations with common goals. Usually...