Think Tanks: New Organizational Actors in a Changing Swedish Civil Society
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Think Tanks: New Organizational Actors in a Changing Swedish Civil Society ˚ berg1 • Stefan Einarsson2 Pelle A
•
Marta Reuter3
The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Policy institutes, or ‘‘think tanks’’, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. In this article, we conceptualize think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, linking the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and of systems of interest representation. Using the case of Sweden as an illustration, we argue that the recent decades’ rise of think tanks in institutional settings outside of the USA can only be understood if we take into account the particular features and institutional policy access opportunities of the domestic civil society in each national case, and that think tanks should be analytically understood as the allies of, rather than competitors to, the older, established forces in civil society. Keywords Think tanks Civil society regimes Corporatism Sweden
˚ berg, Stefan Einarsson and Marta Reuter have contributed Pelle A equally to this article. & Stefan Einarsson [email protected] ˚ berg Pelle A [email protected] Marta Reuter [email protected] 1
Ersta Sko¨ndal Bra¨cke University College, Stockholm, Sweden
2
Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
3
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Introduction One of the most visible worldwide developments in civil society in the last two decades has been the increasing proliferation of a new type of policy-oriented actor: policy institutes or ‘‘think tanks’’. Think tanks, usually defined in the literature as formally autonomous organizations that disseminate, or themselves produce, policy research (see Stone and Garnett 1998; Stone 2000; McGann 2007; Medvetz 2008, 2012), appear to be becoming ubiquitous in many policy arenas; their activities, as described in the literature, range from compiling and (re-)packaging academic research results to producing their own research inhouse, and from mere provision of facts and information to active promotion of ideological agendas and political viewpoints. They have been characterized in the literature as ‘‘switchboards’’ through which epistemic communities are connected, and as ‘‘universities without students’’ (Weaver 1989), but also, perhaps more sceptically, as ‘‘dealers in second-hand ideas’’ (Stone 1996). The think tank label itself is today increasingly seen as a powerful discursive tool used by organizations to position themselves at the crossroads of academia, politics, media and business (Medvetz 2012). Until the 1990s, think tanks were widely regarded as a typically US American phenomenon produced by the unique institutional traits of the American political system and culture (e.g. Stone 1996). In recent decades, however, the global proliferation of these organizations has led to a growing scholarly interest in them also in other national contexts (e.g. Stone and Denham 2004; Pautz 2012; Kelstrup 2016). In this cont
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