It seems that most of them are pretty much right leaning or at least essentially conservative in their viewpoints and some of them are hard core right wing. In fact, I guess I can’t think of any that I’d consider liberal, per se. 'Course I don’t know a lot of them, but when I see that such and such a spokesman from xyz think tank says blah blah blah, it almost always seems to be a pretty conservative viewpoint. So…?
Most of these think tanks were formed in the 70s and 80s as a conscious alternative to liberal academia. There’s no need to form a think tank to give a salary to someone who writes books on the oppression of lesbian seagulls in pre-war Bolivia, those people could get university teaching positions.
Rand is pretty liberal.
I’m assuming that the OP was looking for attempts at a factual answer about the ideological distribution of think tanks, and not GD-style (at best) unsupported speculation about whether conservative think tanks were inspired by academia’s alleged preference for supporting research on oppression of lesbian Bolivian seagulls. (Are we allowed to use rolleyes in GQ?)
I don’t know of stats about the total numbers of think tanks of various persuasions, but I have seen some that claim to show that the most-cited think tanks in media references trend heavily conservative. Which, if true, would help explain the OP’s subjective experience of encountering only conservative ones.
Note, however, that this report is almost a decade old, and is a product of Fairness and Accuracy In Media (FAIR), a liberal organization. It says, in part:
I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, CC, but I believe the reason it looks like so many think tanks are conservative is that for the most part, only the conservative organizations call them “think tanks.”
Just so. Thank you. I’m wondering if anyone has any other references that are any more up to date. I see the Hoover Institute referenced quite often, as well, which is quite clearly a very conservative orgainization (and not frequently labeled as such). I’l keep watching. In the meantime, thank you for your response.
I just checked Wikipedia, and it lists the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and the Heritage Foundation as conservative think tanks. It lists the Institute for Policy Studies, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the Center for American Progress as liberal think tanks. It considers the Brookings Institution to be fairly centrist and the Cato Institute to be libertarian. That’s not anything like a complete list or even a list of the most well known, of course. It’s just a few that whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry thought of offhand.
I believe if a think tank is liberal, it is usually referred to as a cabal.
I am finding it difficult to extract firm numbers on any of this. Part of the problem is I do not see that “Think Tank” is a really well defined term. Does a group of academics who meet once a year constitute a “Think Tank”? Can a 1-2 person organization call itself a think tank? Does a think tank need to be not-for-profit? Does a think tank have to espouse (at least on paper if not in fact) a non-biased approach to its subjects or can they be overt in support for a particular agenda? I am not really asking for answers to those but just pointing out there is a lot of gray area in this.
While no hard and fast numbers seem available looking into it I come away with a distinct sense that conservative think tanks outnumber liberal and centrist think tanks. If not outnumber they certainly seem to be much better funded so their ability to get their message out if greater than their liberal/centrist counterparts. Certainly conservatives specifically start/fund “think tanks” for the explicit reason to have something out there to support their agenda. Again liberals probably do the same thing but conservative groups seem to be far ahead of the curve versus liberals on this one.
Being GQ I’ll end with some cites below for this. I know the cites reference liberal organizations/people so may be considered biased but I have not found any conservative writing suggesting the reverse. Take it FWIW.
CC, perhaps you mean political think tanks. There are many think tanks that deal outside politics or are politically neutral, ranging from the big daddy RAND Corporation to the little educational think tank I used to work for.
72.4% of think tanks are conservative.
Well now, I’m not sure I really ever made any distinction. I originally hazily formed the question when I realized that I had seen and heard references to “think tanks” in the press and noticed that what was reported often had a conservative tone. And it struck me that maybe there’s some sort of correspondence, but that’s as far as I thought it out when I posted. All of us being smarter than any of us, I posed the question. Is there a significant difference in the philosophical or political leaning of an educational think tank vs a political one? I may see little difference between them as a result of having had lunch with a very prominant big time educational researcher a couple years ago who is associated with a large think tank, and as the meal progressed, I discovered that the guy was a few steps to the right of Louis XIV, so I now have the whole thing fairly conflated in my own mind. I think I’m hijacking my own thread here.
“according to some statistics I recently made up”: Dave Barry
I guess my point is some statistics just aren’t available/practical, so you’ll either get a made-up answer or a rough guess.
(Sigh.) How about no political leaning. That’s my whole point.