Organizing at the nexus of business, government, media and science: A relational perspective on think tanks

Think tanks play a central role in shaping public policy, yet research has tended to focus on a small set of prominent organizations and has offered limited evidence on how the wider population of think tanks gains influence. This paper develops a relational perspective that treats think tanks as boundary organizations located at the intersection of academia, government, media, and business. We argue that board interlocks embed think tanks in these institutional fields and that audiences use this embeddedness as a status cue when evaluating the credibility of think tanks’ policy expertise. Because think tanks must balance dependence and autonomy across fields, we predict an inverted U shaped relationship between embeddedness in each field and influence in Congress and the media. We test these ideas using an unbalanced panel of approximately 700 U.S. think tanks from IRS Form 990 records, combined with board data for organizations in each institutional field and measures of influence based on mentions in congressional hearings, the New York Times, and Fox News. Fixed effects models provide partial support for the balancing argument, with the strongest evidence for curvilinear effects of academic, government, and media embeddedness on New York Times visibility, and for academic and private equity embeddedness on congressional visibility. The results demonstrate how field spanning ties structure the distribution of policy influence across the broader think tank population.