Neoliberals and technocrats: How coalitions, conflict, and social science combine to formulate public policy and shape public opinion.

Think tanks are a consequential but understudied organizational form that mobilizes coalitions spanning business, social science, government, and media to translate knowledge into public policy and practice. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, we theorize how the field evolved into two competing sociotechnical systems. A technocratic system, organized around behavioral science and institutions such as the Social Science Research Council, became an “obligatory passage point” for policy translation, prompting a rival neoliberal actor-network organized around the Mont Pelerin Society and diffused through the Atlas Network. We test these ideas with a newly compiled dataset of U.S. nonprofit think tanks, combining board interlocks (951 organizations, 1998–2010) with mission-statement text analysis (N = 1,072). The director network exhibits a stable core–periphery structure, anchored by technocratic organizations such as the Brookings Institution, and resource accumulation is linked to brokerage: betweenness centrality positively predicts assets and liabilities, whereas degree centrality is negatively associated with them. Mission statements reveal systematic ideological differentiation: neoliberal archetypes (including Heritage Foundation) increase in prominence in 2001–2003, while a Brookings archetype predicts closer proximity to the network core. Together, the findings clarify how competing translation systems structure influence, resources, and ideological coordination in the policy domain.