The fact that think tanks and NGOs insist they are, and represent, "civil society" gives the game away, in a "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" sort of way.
From Palladium Magazine, April 2:
As a Canadian, studying the output of American think tanks has become something of an obsession for me. For better or worse, though mostly for the better, think tanks are a foreign commodity in Canada. Sure, we have organizations like the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe, which are our Cato Institute and Brookings Institution respectively, but they fill a narrow niche. Broadly speaking, most Canadian think tanks are little more than PO boxes with a landing page.
The austere job market for policy wonks in Canada is downstream of the country’s robust party system. Governing parties don’t need to outsource their policy development and, when they do, ideas can be supplied by ad hoc committees, commissions, and consultants that evaporate into the ether when their work is done. The parties themselves are highly member-driven. Some of my earliest memories were from the stuffy basement of our local Liberal Party headquarters where my parents volunteered. Though I barely understood what was going on, I relished the ritual of staying up past my bedtime to watch election results come in while old Anglican ladies manufactured triangular sandwiches.
American politics is a completely different beast. The framers of the U.S. Constitution had an aversion to partisan politics and so designed a system of checks and balances that grants individual elected officials enormous free agency. While transaction costs and the game theory that pulls electoral democracies towards a two party system—termed Duverger’s law—made parties an inevitability, progressive anti-patronage reforms and the move to primary elections have long since eroded the social base for thick, membership-driven political parties and the efficient party machines which excelled at delivering votes for politicians. .
Modern U.S. think tanks, and the broader nonprofit advocacy world, emerged in their place. Ostensibly nonpartisan organizations such as the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute serve as holding tanks and convening spaces for Democratic and Republican functionaries while they are in and out of power. Yet because the parties themselves contain internal factions, the establishment’s grip on power is contingent on the makeup of Congress and the stochastic process behind party nominations. Given tight staff budgets, lawmakers outsource their legislative, communications, and networking strategies to whichever policy outfit overlaps with their political philosophy and electoral base. This ideas industry allows movement conservatives to turn to the Heritage Foundation, trade unionists to the Economic Policy Institute, libertarians to the Cato Institute, and so on.
Other countries’ political parties outsource to independent think tanks too, but usually within the context of a formal parliamentary relationship. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Germany, for instance, is an independent think tank that functions as the policy organ of the center-right Christian Democratic Union. Crucially, however, over 95% of its funding comes from the German government and they have no direct intraparty competitor. Such think tanks are thus more like adjuncts to the formal party system than genuinely independent policy actors. In contrast to the U.S. policy ecosystem, policy development is therefore far more aligned to party incentives, though at the potential cost of being overly conformist and deferential to the status quo.
Associations Without Members
In recent decades, ideological self-sorting and the consolidation of power under leadership has made Congress look and act more like a parliament. Yet without the complementary institutions that make parliaments work, it’s a tenuous equilibrium at best. The national parties, to the extent they still exist, are largely lifestyle brands attached to fundraising funnels. Unlike in actual parliamentary democracies, lawmakers have no direct obligation to vote with their party. Votes must instead be whipped through horse-trading and indirect sanctions, such as the denial of powerful committee assignments or the withdrawal of support on re-election campaigns.
The nonprofit advocacy world helps grease the wheel of party cohesion by mobilizing activists, lobbyists, pollsters, and grassroots outreach whenever a big vote is afoot. These are what Matthew Yglesias refers to as “the groups.” While the number of such organizations may appear large and unruly, they typically derive core funding from a countable number of upstream foundations or philanthropists.
Funders are drawn from a similar social class on both the left and right, and are close enough to Dunbar’s number within any given area to enable interpersonal forms of coordination i.e. the sorts of communicative action governed by trust, reputation, and conformity to shared norms. Yet given the insulation of funders and advocates from electoral imperatives, there is nothing to prevent them from self-organizing around the sorts of self-defeating policy platforms that make pollsters like David Shor cringe. On the contrary: without the moderating forces of intraparty bargaining within a consolidated party superstructure, ideological clichés become the only viable Schelling point around which to organize collective action....
....MUCH MORE
Also at Palladium, March 28:
How the Kurdish Offensive in Iran Unraveled
