Democrats and Republicans rely on partisan think tanks for policy proposals, along with the numbers and findings that justify them. How did think tank research reach a central place in our politics and how influential are they? E. J. Fagan finds that partisan think tanks like the Heritage Foundation helped polarize the congressional issue agenda and debate, replacing the non-partisan expertise that Congress used to rely on. Conservative think tanks are gearing up for a possible second Trump administration while Biden’s policy agenda remains reliant on the liberal side of the think tank establishment.
Guest: E. J. Fagan, University of Illinois, Chicago
Study: The Thinkers
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: How think tanks drive polarization and policy, this week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman. Democrats and Republicans rely on policy proposals developed by partisan think tanks along with the numbers and findings that justify them, which often come from the same places. How did think tank research and wonkery reach a central place in our politics, and are the increasingly polarized researchers a cause or effect of our polarized political environment? This week I talked to E.J Fagan of the University of Illinois Chicago about his new Oxford book, The Thinkers. He finds that partisan think tanks like the Heritage Foundation helped polarize the Congressional issue agenda and debate, replacing the nonpartisan expertise that Congress used to rely on. Their numbers and takes still matter, but they increasingly represent two different political worlds. Conservative think tanks are gearing up for the second possible Trump administration while Biden’s policy agenda remains reliant on the liberal side of the think tank establishment. I think you’ll find this conversation helpful in understanding their important roles. So tell us about the main findings from your new book, The Thinkers.
E.J. Fagan: Yeah, for the main findings of this book, I’m looking at partisan think tanks. I’m looking specifically at four of the most insider-y of partisan think tanks. These are the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And the main finding is that they increase polarization, or at least they are a key part of the process that created polarization among elites in the United States that began in the late-1970s. I think when we talk about polarization of the public today, there’s other mechanisms that they’re not as involved in, but that process I think does not start, if not for partisan think tanks.
Matt Grossmann: So American listeners may not be familiar with just how weird our think tank infrastructure is. So how do we compare to other countries and what are the roles of American think tanks?
E.J. Fagan: It’s definitely weird. It varies by country, and so I’m going to generalize for a lot of countries here. But for example, Anglophone countries are a little bit more like us than others, but still we’re pretty close to unique. American think tanks are privately funded. They’re privately funded by a relatively small number of very rich, very ideological donors. Specifically these partisan think tanks, very ideological donors. And political parties have really no alternative. So it’s very common in most democracies for political parties to have think tanks that they control. There’s some version of public funding, either indirectly through a university system or directly just through government contracts. Members of that party sit on the board of the think tank. They often are employed by the think tank. Former ministers might have a job at a think tank when they’re out of power. And they serve the interests of the political party.
They do party-like things. They help them develop policy positions. They help them make arguments to the public. They help them, again, house staff who are out of government. And very common. And it’s common enough that the UNDP, the United Nations Development Program, when it sets up a new democracy, one of the recommendations it has is to set up a system of think tanks, because they are important to policy entrepreneurship and creativity and problem solving within a government. In the United States, political parties still have all those needs. They still need someone to be their close policy advisors, they still need someone to be that creative entrepreneurial force, but they don’t control them, which means that the think tanks are trying to change the political parties that they’re working very closely with. And because they’re run by very ideological people, people with an agenda, they are very successful often at taking the parties from a more centrist position and moving them to the extremes.
Matt Grossmann: So, because not everybody may be familiar with these, tell us a little bit about their position. I know they have some ties to university style research, they have some ties to the media, they have some ties to Congress. What is their position and what roles are they playing?
E.J. Fagan: Sure. They’re mostly playing an insider-y role. My favorite kind of example of this is if you look at the YouTube pages of some of these think tanks, they have nothing. They have like a thousand views on their videos, and even though they’re incredibly important organizations. Some of them play a more public facing role, but for the most part they view their most effective way to influence public policy is to essentially be surrogate staff for policymakers. That is, they are on the outside, they’re making arguments, but they’re making arguments from a trusted position. The first of these think tanks that really becomes important is the Heritage Foundation, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in the future. They have a little bit more of an outsider-y orientation just because of history, because of the way the conservative movement works where they’re constantly fighting the Republican Party from the outside. But they are writing policy recommendations, they are talking to policymakers about those policy recommendations.
They are playing an important role in staffing the government. They’re probably the most important places where ideological staff or just staff come from in the executive branch, when you’re looking for committee staff in Congress. And they play a smaller role in things like the media. So it’s very common for a media story about some policy debate when they’re trying to have representatives from a conservative and progressive side, journalists might call up the American Enterprise Institute, they might call up the Center for American Progress and say, “Can you send me an expert because I need to talk to somebody about this.”
Matt Grossmann: So you open with the example of the Affordable Care Act and go back to it. So play out that example. What role did think tanks play in it, and to what extent can we say that it would’ve turned out differently absent think tanks?
E.J. Fagan: So what I documented here is that partisan think tanks playing a role at every stage of the Affordable Care Act. So the whole football field. So if you’re thinking about at the far end of the football field, right at kickoff, they’re up with ideas. And specifically for the Affordable Care Act, the Heritage Foundation came up with an idea to solve a core problem with keeping the basic American free enterprise insurance system and still providing healthcare to Americans, and that problem is the problem of pre-existing conditions. That people who are healthy don’t want to buy health insurance until they’re sick, but that breaks the insurance system. Many other countries solve this with some sort of universal system where you’re required to pay taxes and then you get some sort of healthcare in return for those taxes. But in the United States, conservatives, they wanted to maintain a free enterprise system, and they saw, for example, the Clinton administration and Democrats during that time preparing to introduce something that looked more like a single payer system through Congress.
So in the late-1980s, the Heritage Foundation specifically, at the time I believe he was the director of domestic policy, Stuart Butler said, “Okay, I need to come up with a plan.” He was actually an economist. He wasn’t really a healthcare person by trade. He’s made some real contributions to conservative public policy and tax policy in the 1980s, something like an enterprise zone. Stuart Butler was key to getting those things passed. So he hired an outside consultant and said, “Okay, design me a plan where I can provide healthcare to all Americans, I can solve the pre-existing condition problem, but I can maintain free enterprise.” And what came along was the individual mandate. You require everybody to have healthcare, to buy healthcare. You subsidize people who can’t buy healthcare, and then you require health insurance companies to offer healthcare to all Americans. And that basic outline is essentially Obamacare. That gets introduced into Congress by John Chafee, who’s a senator from Rhode Island. It becomes essentially the Republican alternative to the Hillary Clinton-led healthcare push in the 1990s. That fails.
Republicans, once they don’t need to be the alternative to as something that might actually pass, no longer all that interested in healthcare, but the plan stays around. It becomes the basis for Mitt Romney’s healthcare reform in the 2000s. The Heritage Foundation does play a little bit of a role there as well. And then when Barack Obama is saying, “I want to reform healthcare. What are my solutions to keep the current basic system and not try to run up against all the stakeholders in the system?” He designs the Affordable Care Act basically around the exact same framework, in fact, very transparently around the same framework. Heritage Foundation did not support the Obamacare plan, and it was more generous than conservatives would’ve want. There were details that were different, but that basic framework was developed by the Heritage Foundation. But then the question is, “Okay, so who took the framework from the Heritage Foundation and then moved it into something that could pass and that Democrats would support?”
And that takes place largely at the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress was a think tank that was started in 2003 by John Podesta, who was a former Clinton in chief of staff. He wanted a progressive alternative to the Heritage Foundation. He saw how effective the Heritage Foundation was. I actually have a quote from an anonymous Heritage Foundation executive saying that they informally consulted with the Center for American Progress on how to set up their think tank because they were so proud of how effective they had set up their think tank. And he hires pretty early on after he loses his election, former Senator, Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle spends much of the next four years working on a healthcare plan, gets in trouble because he was also lobbying on the side for some healthcare companies, and was going to be the Health and Human Services secretary under Barack Obama.
That nomination fails, but writes a book called Critical, which is both a political and policy critique of past democratic healthcare pushes, and essentially lays out what would become Obamacare. Obamacare is moving its way through Congress. It passes the United States Senate, but in a form that is not really passable. It was a placeholder. They expected to come back after the New year in 2009, come back in early 2010 and pass the real version of the bill through the United States House through a conference committee. And then Scott Brown wins the Special Senate election in Massachusetts. Democrats lose their 60 seat majority. He had campaigned against the bill saying he’s going to personally kill the bill. So you have a bad bill that’s passed the United States Senate, and Democrats are basically convinced that that’s a non-starter, that they can’t just pass that version of the bill and that the healthcare push is dead.
Rahm Emanuel, who’s in the White House starts arguing for essentially a compromise, trying to find a minimal version of healthcare reform, maybe something for children that they could pass and they could move on and they could not worry about this anymore. But a bunch of scholars at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who had been recently hired out of the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service, they say, “No, there’s a way to pass this and we can use budget reconciliation.” Democrats actually hadn’t used budget reconciliation for a long time. They hadn’t been in power for long enough for a long time in order to use it, and it had never been used in the complicated manner that would be necessary to pass the Affordable Care Act. But a group of them led by someone named James Horny writes a memo that basically says, “Here’s the 13 step process to getting that passed.”
They hand it to somebody in the Obama White House. Barack Obama is convinced, and then that eventually is the procedure they use to pass the reforms to the Affordable Care Act. The last part that the Affordable Care Act it plays in this story is at repeal. Donald Trump is in office. He’s trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And Jimmy Kimmel actually has a really important viral moment in the early part of that process in April. He had just had a kid, that kid had required open heart surgery. If you watch the video, it’s heartbreaking. This is a couple of days after that. Jimmy Kimmel is being very emotional on air, but he’s being very emotional in a non-policy-specific way. Jimmy Kimmel was not at the time, a politicized talk show host. He was the guy who did The Man Show. He was the guy who did crude jokes with Matt Damon.
This was not a political show. This was not Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, et cetera. And then he starts to get into the issue. And one thing that I uncovered in my interviews is that one of the reasons why over time, his monologues on this over that summer, which became so important to blocking repeal, became more grounded in policy specifics, is that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities were talking to him behind the scenes and feeding him information that he could then turn into jokes and turn into his thing.
And this culminated in a very important viral monologue he had in September during the last real attempt to repeal the bill, which the day before the monologue looked like might actually happen. John McCain, who was the deciding vote on the bill, had actually come out in favor of what was called skinny repeal, the last Graham Cassidy bill. We have a very viral monologue by Jimmy Kimmel that is very grounded in policy specifics. Basically reads like a memo from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, because it was, and that is the last nail in the coffin for Obamacare repeal. So at every stage in the process of the Affordable Care Act, we can see think tanks playing a very important role. I think the process plays out differently at all stages if they don’t exist.
Matt Grossmann: So we’ve already mentioned the Heritage Foundation a few times, and I know it plays an important role in your story. So how much of this is a specific story of the creation of the Heritage Foundation and then people attempting to emulate and learn from its role? And how much is it just the first actor, but we were bound to reach this equilibrium? And are there still differences? Did they successfully copy each other or is there a real difference between the way this operates on the left and right?
E.J. Fagan: So the Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973. Their origin story, which has different versions of the origin story depending on where you read it. I use the one from their own autobiography that they issued as part of their 25th anniversary. You have three staffers, the heir to the Coors Brewing Fortune, Paul Weyrich and Ed Feulner, they’re congressional staffers and they’re really angry at the American Enterprise Institute, which was the leading conservative think tank in DC at the time. And they had released a book about federal subsidies for supersonic passenger jets.
And they said that those subsidies were bad, they were bad for America, they were not conservative. And that book was released about a week after they were voted on and passed, and they were angry, Fuelner and Weyrich were. They met with the president of the American Enterprise Institute and said, “So why didn’t you release this a week earlier? Why didn’t you try to influence the vote in Congress?” And the president of the American Enterprise Institute replied, “I wasn’t trying to influence the vote.” It’s a story about agenda setting. It’s a story about timing your research in a way that us academics don’t tend to do. And the American Enterprise Institute was organized very much like and still is very much like a university that is, there’s a bunch of scholars, we’re hired. We have some degree of academic freedom, that freedom about what we want to write about. And when we’re done with the research, we publish it. It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t acting like an interest group. And so the idea behind the Heritage Foundation was that we are going to create something that looks more like an interest group. It’s not a university without students. It’s not just a consultant or a contractor doing work for the government. It’s producing research, it’s producing it very quickly. It’s producing it timed to when it can be most impactful. It’s playing in the media, it’s lobbying, it’s using its research and lobbying it to the United States Congress after it gets issued and it’s acting as a team.
It’s strategic. This becomes a very effective model. Heritage almost immediately becomes more influential than any of the other think tanks in Washington DC. They form an alliance with Ronald Reagan that becomes very fruitful after Reagan wins the 1980 presidential election. Heritage does things like write of an extensive plan for every federal agency in the Reagan administration or whoever won the 1980 election. And then Ronald Reagan hands that out to his department heads and says, “This is what I would like you to do when you’re here.” In fact, he hired many of the people who wrote those chapters to be those department heads.
You might have heard of Project 2025, which is a key word out there in the internet today. And that’s just the latest incarnation of this. It’s not new. Heritage has always kind of had two part plans, right? People and policy so that you have people, people who could be hired, who are conservatives, who could do jobs in the federal government. They’ve maintained rolodexes that used to maintain a directory that was in every university library of conservative policy experts and then a plan, plan for what they could do. And Project 2025 is just that. It’s bigger than it has been before. There’s some indication that it’ll be more influential than previous times, but this is just a repeat of what they’ve been doing for every presidential election since 1980.
Heritage has many indicators, many of whom I don’t directly study in this book, but most think tanks that are founded after 1973 are founded on what scholars call the advocacy model. That is they’re doing think tanky stuff, but they are doing it as an interest group. I used to work for one of these think tanks. It wasn’t a partisan think tank, it wasn’t ideological think tank. But we had three people producing research. We had two people lobbying on that research.
We had myself and one other doing publicity for that research. And we were very strategically planning when we did all of those things. And it was a very effective means to influence public policy because as interest group scholars like yourself know information is core to lobbying. It’s what lobbyists do most of the time and think tanks are best positioned to provide that information. They provide strategic planning, they provide long-term planning in a ways that most interest groups are actually not very good at. So this was kind of the best of both worlds as a way to organize a think tank. Another think tank is founded in the early 1980s, the Center in Budget Policy Priorities. That’s a progressive think tank founded by Robert Greenstein, who was a Carter administration official. He says that he didn’t found it in heritage image, meaning that he wasn’t really aware.
He was aware of Heritage but wasn’t aware of how it was organized. He just founded how he logically thought an organization would be most effective. And they’re very similar in the way that they’re organized. They’re different in the quality of information they produce. I really do respect a lot of the information coming out of the center and budget policy priorities less so for the Heritage Foundation, but they’re very similar in form. So to answer your question, I think you probably would’ve gotten think tanks that look like this, but I think that Heritage’s early success has a real profound impact on the conservative movement. I don’t think that Ronald Reagan could be the conservative libertarian leader that he was without the support of the Heritage Foundation and a couple of the think tanks that are founded immediately afterwards like the Manhattan Institute and the Cato Institute.
Matt Grossmann: So you grew up in the policy agendas world, and so a lot of this book tries to look at the agendas of think tanks relative to other people. So what is the bottom line here about the extent to which think tanks mirror the agenda of Congress and the administration and to what extent they are shapers of it versus kind of captive to it?
E.J. Fagan: Sure. I’ll let you have the second one first. I don’t think they’re shapers of it. One of the golden rules of agenda setting is that almost everybody’s an agenda taker, not an agenda maker. That is there’s something external setting the agenda. Actors might try to nudge it one way or the other, but for the most part they are trying to take advantage of what is on the agenda right now. There’s a horribly named theory in the policy process called the garbage can theory. It’s the worst theory named in political science, but it’s a cool theory. And the basic idea behind the theory is that policymaking doesn’t work linearly where we prioritize a problem, we decide we need to deal with it, and then a bunch of experts sit around and come up with a solution to that problem and it’s debated and enacted and eventually becomes law.
That’s not how policymaking works because there’s no time for it. A problem is on the agenda and it can take a long time to work out solutions to that problem, to come up with compromises, to bring people on board, a coalition. And so there’s an independent stream of action that’s taking place where people are developing solutions, coming up with ideas, and when something hits the agenda that you could potentially pair to that solution, you try to combine those together. You try to find a vehicle for your solution that’s currently on the agenda. Sometimes that solves the problem. Sometimes it does a good job of solving the problem. Sometimes it does a not so great job of solving the problem. My favorite example of this is the Patriot Act, specifically section three of the Patriot Act. 9/11 happens immediately. We realize that we need to pass some major changes to America’s anti-terrorism system.
And one of the things that was in the solution stream that was being developed by Senator Carl Levin and his staffer at least be in the year previously, was a major reform to the anti-money laundering system in the United States to eliminate what were called shell banks. Did terrorists use these? Kind of. Right. There was a little bit of terrorism going through these shell banks, but for the most part they were used by other sources of anti-money laundering and they got that section into the Patriot Act and that section’s still in law and it’s still one of the most important anti-money laundering reforms of those 30 years. That’s the game think tanks play. And they’re able to do it because they are such close policy advisors to political parties. They’re able to say, “You got a problem? We have a recession. We need to pass a stimulus bill.
Let me write the stimulus bill. And if I write that stimulus bill, you’re both going to solve the problem that’s on the agenda that you want to solve. But you can also do some of the things that you wanted to do in the first place because you’re conservative, you are progressive. This is the public policy you already support.” Now anybody can familiar with psychology and confirmation bias can understand the perils of that, right? You can have your cake and eat it too. That’s a very nice message that people can send to consent. Now in terms of them actually responding to the agenda, this is actually something I was surprised in. So I tested this. I tested do think tanks work on the issues that move on to the congressional agenda at that same time. So if this is going to be an energy year, do we get a lot more energy reports out of these four think tanks?
And the only place that responds like this that has this very short-term relationship to the agenda is the Heritage Foundation. So Heritage, they plan, they say, “Okay, this is going to hit the agenda. We’re going to release a bunch of energy reports this year, try to shape that process.” The other think tanks don’t, they continue to work on a fairly stable agenda that’s mostly their core priorities. They might try to pair those priorities to what’s going on in the agenda, but they don’t shift the issues that they’re working on. They have some experts. Those experts have a policy agenda and they’re going to write their report on whatever highway systems this year, no matter whether or not there’s a transportation bill on the agenda.
Matt Grossmann: So you mentioned that you find a close relationship between congressional polarization and several measures of the prominence of these partisan think tanks. So what should we make of that overtime relationship? What are the mechanisms by which they might be related?
E.J. Fagan: Sure. So I test this in two ways. So I test this using an overtime relationship and an cross issue relationship. And I wish this is a podcast. I wish I could show everybody the graph. The graph that made me know I had a book to write. And that is a graph where I compare how often think tanks testify before Congress and polarization in Congress. And they are as close of a fit with a one-year lag. So they testify more. One Congress before polarization increases as close of a fit as any two time series lines I’ve ever seen. The correlation is incredibly high. And if you took that naively, if you looked at that, you would say the only reason polarization increased between 1973 and 2017 was think tanks. And that’s obviously not true. But what’s clear is that there’s a process going on that think tanks are integral to it.
I think that there’s an old cliche in science where correlation does not equal causation. I think this is a case where correlation is too close to equal causation because they would imply a mono causal relationship. So what’s going on in the political parties? You have interest groups forming, you have ideological donors really mobilizing, you have changes to the party system in terms of geography. And all of that is creating, I think a lot of demand for conservative and then later progressive public policy and solutions that the other party can’t agree with. And so they’re going to vote against it and that demand needs to be satisfied. Now, if you don’t have experts, if you’re consulting with neutral experts and you’re still an agenda taker, right? Your agenda is still set by the problem that’s on the agenda, this isn’t going to be very successful because you have a problem on the agenda.
You got to solve the problem. You got to do something about the problem. And even if you have a bunch of people who are conservative, they care about the proper role of government, they care about who bears the trade-offs, that conservative constituencies don’t bear the trade-offs of public policy. They’re still going to go to neutral experts and get basically the same range of options as a progressive because that’s how neutral expertise works, that there’s only really so many ways to best solve a problem. And there’s not that much range for disagreement. That’s indeed what happens in the 1970s when you have Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, who are reading the same conservative magazines as the people who work at the Heritage Foundation, but then they go to a neutral expert and they say, “Well, you probably should develop an environmental protection agency. You probably should pass an equal rights amendment,” et cetera.
And that leads to very moderate policymaking. And that’s indeed what we often see in many other countries. But then when the Heritage Foundation comes along and then all of its imitators come along, the American Enterprise Institute changes itself a little bit to be a little more like it. 20 years later when the progressive think tanks come along and you have this demand for policymaking and you have a problem on the agenda, now they have plausible solutions to solve that problem that’s on the agenda. And those plausible solutions are very progressive or conservative. Do they work? I think I make an argument in this book that oftentimes they don’t. Maybe sometimes they do. And I think that’s what’s led to this rise in polarization that you have the actualization of conservatism and progressivism that didn’t exist before the think tanks.
Matt Grossmann: So another key event here in this time series is the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995, which does lead to an increase in partisan think tank influencer involvement in congressional hearings. But especially important because it also coincides with this big drop in nonpartisan sources of information from committee staff and institutional staff resources and elimination of some places that members of Congress could go for neutral information. So talk about that relationship. To what extent is this kind of an intentional replacement and what were the consequences?
E.J. Fagan: Yeah, this is another one that surprised me. It’s well known by scholars of Congress. 1995, it’s a year where the Congressional Research Service gets cut. The Office of Technology assessment is eliminated, the congressional budget office gets cut, especially the GAO. It gets cut quite a lot and committee staff get cut. Lots of these neutral sources of information in Congress’s expertise is cut. And I think it’s easy to think about that as something that happens independently of these think tanks. But I just started reading Heritage Foundation reports from the few years preceding that, and it led me back to a book called the Imperial Congress. It was a book written in the late 1980s. It was a public, it was an edited volume by the Heritage Foundation. It included Newt Gingrich running the forward for it, which kind of tells you that he at least read it.
And it is making the argument that we need to cut the expert information sources inside of Congress. Now, their argument isn’t quite the way I characterize it, which is they’re cutting their competition, right? They want to replace those neutral information sources. But what their argument is that Congress has grown too powerful. This is an age when Republicans were winning the presidency almost every single election. But Democrats controlled the house the entire time and the Senate most of the time. And they were able to make the argument that essentially Congress is too powerful. The President isn’t powerful enough.
Come the 1990s, they control Congress again. And I think it’s fascinating that an institution decides to cut its own power, staffing and information and resources, that is power. So why would Republicans who take over Congress with the… And they have these policy recommendations from the contract with America, why would they decide that they’re going to have fewer resources and fewer staff? And I think my argument is that they thought that those neutral sources of information would tell them the, quote, unquote, wrong answer when they say, “Hey, what’s going to happen when we cut welfare with a big welfare reform bill?” They might not get the answer they want.
And so they preferred when they were having those debates to call in think tanks. And you see this huge spike in think tank testimony during that time. I’ve seen think tanks call that the year of the think tank, which is a very self-serving way to describe it. But it’s very important to that process. And I think that probably the biggest accomplishment of the ’90s from the think tanks, they had a lot of accomplishments during the 1980s under Ronald Reagan is that welfare reform bill. And they played a very important role in it.
Matt Grossmann: So you mentioned that you also look at polarization effects by issue area. And I did notice that there is a relationship in terms of where these folks were involved and what issue area is polarized, but there are some issue areas like foreign policy that they’re very involved in despite not being as polarized. So, what are some of the examples there and the mechanisms that you think are at work and how think tanks polarized?
E.J. Fagan: Sure. I took a whole bunch of different ways to measure the issues that think tanks are working on: reports, so I have a data set of about 30,000 think tank reports from these organizations, from their websites. They’re lobbying disclosure reports, the ones that do lobby, the American Enterprise Institute does not file lobbying disclosure reports and some of the others don’t have them for all years, when members of Congress call them to testify and when members of Congress cite them on the floor of Congress. I had all these different data sets that show basically the same thing, which is what is the policy agenda of think tanks, the information that’s demanded by Congress, and the information that’s supplied by the think tanks.
And what I find is a pretty consistent relationship and not as perfectly correlational as the time series relationship. And I don’t really measure this over time because I don’t have enough observations in any given year in many of these issues, specifically on the way I measure polarization. But there’s a pretty clear trend, that is the issues that have more think tank attention are more polarized. There are some exceptions, and the question is, why are the think tanks working on issues, right? When I say they want to polarize, that’s what they want: they want to make Democrats more progressive and Republicans more conservative. That’s part of their mission. But they also have issues that they care about, and they care about the traditional issues that the parties have prioritized, and for conservatives, that’s foreign policy.
To this day, the Heritage Foundation produces more reports on foreign policy than anything else. Even as they’ve taken a much more domestic-focused, semi-isolationist view of the world, they’re still doing a lot of work in that area, and that’s because that’s something that conservatives care about. And for progressives, they produce a lot of work on healthcare and social welfare policy and education and environmental policy and things that progressives care about. They’re doing what you might call an issue subsidization strategy, something that Hall and Deirdorf in lobbying as a legislative subsidy would argue for, that they’re trying to reduce the legislative costs of the issues that they want Congress to spend more time working on, which means they’re not working on the boring, non-partisan issues. They’re not working on transportation policy and public lands and agriculture and science and technology and really big areas of policy-making in the United States government, and they’re just not represented there. And those coincidentally are the areas that are not very polarized.
Matt Grossmann: The book blames think tanks in part for polarization, analyzes some of their numbers, and isn’t very positive about what kinds of information that they are providing. But I know that your personal view is a lot more positive about their role in American politics, so how should we reconcile that? What is the role of biased information and how do we know that just any slap-shod operation wouldn’t be able to produce what these folks want?
E.J. Fagan: I think their role in American politics could be a very positive role, and has at times been a very positive role. These are long-term planners: they are strategic, they are the ones that can come up with a plan. So if you think about other information sources for members of Congress, especially ones they really trust, they’re not going to come up with an Affordable Care Act. You’re not going to go to the civil servants at the Department of Health and Human Services and say, “Design me comprehensive healthcare reform.” This is not something that’s really possible. And so, I think they have a core role to play there, and that’s the role they play in every country in the world: parties need policy wonks, and they need policy wonks that they like and trust and work with and can consult with that way.
I think the problem comes when we’re not talking about creativity, we’re not talking about making normative arguments about the proper role of government, but we’re talking about factual claims, “If I do X, Y will happen,” right? That’s a very important thing to understand when you’re making policy, “What’s the cost of this bill going to be? What impact is it going to have on the policy outcomes that I’m trying to accomplish?”, and once you start to make those claims as a partisan think tank, as a biased think, and you’re producing biased information, that gets very dangerous very quickly. It gets very dangerous because you can have a situation where the agenda-setting mechanisms are working for American democracy, that is the public is yelling at their lawmakers, “Solve this problem. This is something I want solved. This is the thing that should be on the top of your agenda right now,” and policymakers listen, and they put down whatever they’re working on and they say, “Okay, we’re going to work on this problem right now.”
And when even polarized parties that aren’t polarized based upon information, they can take that moment and they can come to some compromise. And we’ve seen it happen in recent periods of American history. I love the CHIPS and Science Act I talk about in the book. The CHIPS and Science Act was passed in one of the most polarized Congresses ever, it was Joe Biden’s first Congress. It was a bipartisan vote because pretty much everybody realized that there was a problem that needed to be solved, that there were Ford F-150s that were just sitting in a parking lot waiting for microchips that were in short supply, and people could see down the future and see this might be a problem if foreign countries control such a key resource for us. And there was a bipartisan vote, and hopefully they solved that problem. We’ll see over time, or at least they did their best attempt to do it. Same with the infrastructure bill, same with lots of other things that happened during COVID. This is a normal process.
But once you start disagreeing on the basic facts about public policy, you might come together and say, “Hey, let’s come up with a solution to solve this problem,” and both sides will believe just dimensionally opposed ideas. They might say, “If I pass this policy, the problem will get worse. If I pass this policy, the problem will get better.” You can’t reconcile that. You can’t come to an agreeable solution, you can’t find ways to compensate losers, all the things that political parties are supposed to be doing. What I find when I just look at the information that they’re producing is that they are producing often information that is to the left or right of nonpartisan centers and institutions.
So the Congressional budget office will put out a cost estimate for a bill, the Heritage Foundation will say, “No, this tax cut’s going to cost half a trillion dollars less,” and [inaudible 00:36:50] American [inaudible 00:36:50] will say, “No, it’s going to cost half a trillion dollars more,” now that’s not uniform. The Center for American Progress and Heritage, they’re pretty bad citizens here, right? They’re producing information that’s pretty much every time, pretty biased. They’re producing information that’s out of line with neutral experts. The center and budget and policy priorities, never once when I looked at these cases, never once disagreed with the neutral experts. They put their spin on it, they said, “It’s going to hurt these people. If you’re progressive, you shouldn’t want this.” That’s healthy, that’s good. That’s functional in a democracy.
The American Enterprise Institute, they’re a little mixed. They’re hard to do this kind of analysis on because they don’t respond to the agenda. They’re this university without students model unlike the other three, and I think that’s healthy. I think if we have ideological think tanks who work with one political party but are committed to providing high quality information, but letting people know what the conservative or progressive interests are in the public policy-making, I think that’s a healthy democracy. But I think that when we have parties who just don’t believe the same reality, that polarization is unsolvable.
Matt Grossmann: So, one place that might be happening is on climate change where think tanks have certainly been implicated. And there is a American specific anomaly to solve here, which is just that the American right has been just disproportionately opposed to climate action compared to center right parties elsewhere in the world. And certainly think tanks are mentioned in those kinds of stories. But I guess what would you make of counter arguments that you’re observing some influence, but it’s really downstream of things like fossil fuel interests are more important or more powerful in the United States, and this is just one mechanism they’re using or the conservative movement has a different take in the United States and you’re seeing the manifestations of it.
E.J. Fagan: Yeah, it’s really easy to take. I would call traditional interest groups view of this and say that, “Well, America has these big fossil fuel interests. The Republican Party is associated with those interests, so therefore they’re going to oppose climate change.” And indeed, of course, there’s some of that. The early Bush administration, I think that’s very much the story. But if you look around the world, there’s a lot of fossil fuel producers that are not climate denialists. I saw a wonderful paper at a conference last month, and that paper was about the Kazakhstani government’s work to implement wind and solar. Kazakhstan is a major oil producer, they have lots of reason to oppose wind and solar, but they don’t because they buy into the science of climate change like basically everyone in the world other than the Republican Party. So why: what’s the cause here?
And one thing I do in the book that I, people always, whenever they read it, they’re shocked by it because I don’t know, people don’t remember the late-2000s, but in the late-2000s, we start to get real bad information on climate change, reports from the UN Panel on Climate Change that’s scary, that’s looking at the potential future where we could really end up in a place where we can’t do anything about climate change. And the agenda starts mobilizing around it, we start getting that normal agenda-setting process. One of the most popular movies in the mid-2000s was The Day After Tomorrow, which is a weird climate change disaster movie, Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth is one of the most important documentaries during that time, I show some data on Google Books mentions, and the frequency of mentioning climate change or global warming around the mid-2000s doubles just immediately.
So it’s on the agenda, it’s a problem that needs to be solved, and everybody’s coming up with the solutions to solve it. Lindsey Graham co-sponsors a bill with Joe Lieberman and John Kerry in the United States Senate in 2006, 2007, the Bush administration comes out with a plan to do something about climate change, Sarah Palin comes out and asks for a set of research memos about how climate change will affect Alaska in terms of melting permafrost, right? This is happening, and conservatives realize that if we do something about climate change, that means more taxes, right? That means that there is going to be a huge intrusion into the everyday life of Americans and they don’t like it. And so, they mobilize against this and they should start publishing a lot of, I think what a lot of people call climate denial. There’s a lot of research that comes out immediately after this period that shows that essentially all of the climate denial, we’ll call it research or talking points that are put out there come from conservative think tanks.
The Heritage Foundation doesn’t write a lot of books. One of the papers I cite here, I cite in the book is about books about climate denial. The Heritage Foundation doesn’t write a lot of books, they’re not really involved there, but they’re certainly doing it. The Cato Institute is very important there, the American Enterprise Institute is very important there, the Heartland Institute is, and it persuades conservatives. Now, maybe they were pushing on an open door: conservatives didn’t want to believe in the need for a massive government intervention. But one of the things that when you read these reports that I think gets lost in some of this debate, it’s not just climate change isn’t real. It’s certainly there, there are certainly people at these organizations that are questioning the science of climate change. But what a lot of these think tanks are doing, because this is how they think about public policy, is they’re talking about the costs of climate solutions are very high.
And one of the things I do in the book is I just look at some of the cost estimates of the climate change bills that were working their way through Congress that the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute put out during that time, the AEI report’s not bad, it’s a little bit to the right of the centrists, but the Heritage Foundation report, if you took it seriously, you would say, “This is an economic catastrophe,” right? “This will essentially increase poverty, it will decrease economic growth,” but then when you actually dig into the science underlying the report, the assumptions of the report are pretty bad.
There’s an assumption in the report of, what is the cost of wind and solar going to be in 2020? And they basically just said, “It’s the cost in 2010,” they didn’t decrease that cost over time, and so they were off by a factor of, I think eight, right? They overestimated the cost of new wind and solar by eight during that time, and so they came up with a big negative economic growth number. If you’ve ever read an impact report, you usually estimate economic growth in percentages, “2% annualized economic growth decrease,” they actually did a cumulative number in that paper, which is very strange, “Over the next 30 years, it’s going to decrease GDP by…”, I forget what the number was, $14 trillion or something like that.
And that is, I think, a bigger part of why Republican support for climate change evaporates over the course of two years. It’s not just the denial stuff. I think if you think about someone like Mitt Romney, I don’t think Mitt Romney by 2012 was willing to say, “Climate change isn’t real,” even though he wasn’t speaking up about that during the Republican primary debates. But I do think he could be persuaded that a cap and trade bill would’ve a massive negative impact on economic growth or something like that, so that’s really the role they play. And I think that these think tanks are the big reason why the American Conservative Party is just very different from every conservative party on the planet on climate change. In many systems, the conservative party is the leading environmental party because labor parties were historically associated with factories: they actually wanted to make things dirty because by doing so, they could employ more people in factories. In the United States, that’s not the case.
Matt Grossmann: So, you’ve written a history of American partisan think tanks in the course of doing these analyses, but as someone who’s read a lot of histories of American politics through this era, some of the same people come up if you were to write a history-
Some of the same people come up, if you were to write a history, read a history of a partisan media or of the polarizers in general. And I do note that a lot of these people within these institutions are willing to jump ship. A new administration comes in, they think it’s better to be inside the administration than to be in these partisan think tanks. And many of them were also involved in creating other kinds of infrastructure for the two sides of American politics.
So I guess to what extent do you see think tanks to be their central project versus one of several projects, and why if they’re so influential, do people jump ship so fast?
E.J. Fagan: Well, I will say that some of the jumping ship is just a revolving door, and I think that that makes sense and I think that some people don’t want to be in government for too long because it’s exhausting. But I think your bigger point is fascinating, right? We have a saying in the agenda saying community, which is everything is endogenous. And of course all of these other things are going on at the same time, right? Fox News is created in the mid-nineties. Rush Limbaugh and talk radio become important in the mid 1980s. I quote Rush Limbaugh quite a bit in this book, and we can go on, right? There’s a lot of other conservative institutions, the Federalist Society, many of the conservative interest groups are founded during this time. They’re all talking to each other, they’re all working together. And some of the founders of these think tanks go on to found those things.
So Paul Weyrich was one of the original founders of the Heritage Foundation, and he leaves basically like four years in and decides that he’s going to go found the religious right. And he does. He’s very important in that way. It’s absolutely true that this is an ecosystem and they’re an important part of the ecosystem.
But here’s the kind of puzzle for me. Why didn’t conservatism take off earlier? Why didn’t you get this flourishing of this highly ideological American conservatism when Milton Friedman is writing, when Friedrich Hayek is writing, when Ian Rand is writing, when the National Review takes off, et cetera, that’s 20 to 30 years earlier than when they start having an impact in government.
And I think the answer is, is that a necessary part of that is the actualization, that is someone to write the plan, to execute the order, to be the expert in government, to be the lawyer at the Federalist Society, the judge, et cetera.
And until you have that, all of your conservative hopes and dreams, all of your progressive hopes and dreams isn’t going to show up in actual public policy. It’s not going to be voted on much in the United States Congress, and that’s the essential component that they provided. So in the counterfactual where they don’t exist, I actually do think we’re quite a bit less polarized. But certainly there’s a lot of other things going on and I think that especially now that we have a polarized public and we have this kind of intense fighting and solidification of the American political parties, I think this is much less of the story of that. They’re important still, they still do a lot of that policy work that needs to get done behind the scenes, but they’re not the ones making your neighbor put up a flag that you don’t like.
Matt Grossmann: So as you mentioned, there’s a lot of attention now on Heritage and other conservative think tanks preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, especially for a complete redoing of the American bureaucracy and a politicization of it. And yet, if you look back at the first Trump term, it doesn’t seem like they had as much influence as they might’ve had in other administrations, or that the administration was kind of effective in using them on support of its agenda rather than just kind of going along with the preexisting congressional agenda.
So what should we make of that? What should we expect if we do have a second Trump Administration given what happened last time and the preparation?
E.J. Fagan: I don’t want to go too far beyond the data. Let me just talk a little bit about I think the coalition of the Republican Party, as I see it in the think tanks. The first Trump Administration was still a coalitional government. Chris Christie was important to the early part of the transition. Mike Pence was important to the early part of the transition. People like Bill Barr end up in government. These are essentially the Mitch McConnell side of the Republican Party. I mean, Mitch McConnell’s wife was the Secretary of Transportation. And then there was some people who were also a part of the far right, of the Trumpist factime, you might call it the time in 2016, the Trumpist factime didn’t really exist. Today, I don’t think that, I’ll call it the American Enterprise Institute side of the Republican Party is very influential. And I’ve talked to people, the American Enterprise Institute who said that they’re not on the inside anymore.
They’ve actually been hiring some Democrats. They’ve been hiring more academics. They had an opening in their presidency and they had a chance to hire someone who would be kind of on the Trump side of the party and they didn’t, they ended up hiring essentially a very boring academic type. And on the other hand, the Heritage Foundation has continued this march toward the far right. It’s very strange that I have a little bit of nostalgia for the old Heritage Foundation. I’ve read a lot of Heritage Foundation reports. I’ve probably read more than anybody who doesn’t work there, and I’ve read reports from the seventies, from the eighties, from the nineties, from the two thousands, and they were conservative.
I think they were biased, but there was substance to them. They made an effort to produce information that could be acted on that was useful. I look at Heritage Foundation reports today, and I still read quite a lot of them, and the quality is low.
I really think that they are writing Fox News pieces more than they’re writing policy recommendations, and I think that’s because the things that they want to do, they don’t want to write down. And in Project 2025, they have written quite a bit of it down, and a lot of it is, frankly, extreme far right policy stuff. They hired people from the Trump Administration, kind of the far right of the Trump Administration like Ken Cuccinelli, hired by the Heritage Foundation immediately after the Trump Administration ends. AI didn’t do that. That said, there are new organizations in the Republican Party that I think are important here that are doing good policy work, that are picking up some of that slack. My favorite of these is the [Niskanen Center], which is a think tank that was founded by some former Cato Institute staffers who are upset with some of the climate denial.
And if you just read the reports, it’s high quality stuff, it’s conservative, it’s offering essentially the conservative perspective on some issues, but it’s not, I would say biased, meaning it’s not information that is unreliable. It is, a lot of the people who are writing those reports are essentially normal academics, or people who are in the bureaucracy, people who I respect a lot, and I think that’s the healthy version of the Republican Party.
Will Trump draw from those people when staffing the government? I don’t think so. That said, there’s a lot of political appointees you need to staff a federal government and it might be hard to find 4,000 people who are both experts in a field, in an agency that you want to place them in, and buying into the far right mission. I know a lot of your work is on the education gap, and-
Matt Grossmann: I was just going to ask if part of the evolution here is the Republican public does not really trust experts anymore. They trust scientists less, they trust academics less, they trust universities less. And it does seem like think tanks were originally meant to solve for the fact that… Conservative think tanks were meant to solve for the fact that there was not an obvious cadre of conservative policy experts within universities. But I don’t know if they want to solve that problem anymore.
E.J. Fagan: Or maybe they want some universities to teach, I don’t know, undergraduate students conservative stuff. But yeah, I think they have a talent problem. And I don’t think that if you are a young economist, you might have some conservative tendencies that you want to go into work for the Heritage Foundation these days. They’ve become much more evangelical with all of the baggage that comes with that, and they’ve become much less engaging with academics.
I have quotes in the book from Ed Feulner, the president of the Heritage Foundation, who would write chapters in edited academic volumes about the Heritage Foundation because he was engaging in that community. A lot of this is looking to create an alternative voice within the intellectual debate. And I think a lot of these are the early people who were staffing these organizations consider themselves intellectuals. I just don’t think that that’s the culture anymore at these organizations.
And I don’t know where they’re going to find good qualified people over time to do the very hard work of technical policymaking. It’s easy to go up there and shout on Fox News. It’s easy to write an op-ed. It’s easy to take a very principled position, a first principle based position on something. It’s not easy to figure out what this regulation should say, and I think that’s why you have this demand for that on the Republican side from these other think tanks that are taking Heritage’s place.
One of the last things I do in the book is I tell this story of, Senator Mike Lee introduced a resolution in the 50th anniversary, the 50th birthday in Congress to celebrate that for the Heritage Foundation. He reads off a list of accomplishments. And the first three paragraphs are all about the policy stuff they did in the seventies, eighties and nineties.
We did this, we got this done, we got that done. We established this program, and everything since then, it’s like we established our own website to do news and some donors paid money for endowed chairs. There was nothing listed after, I think 1996, of an actual real boast of policy accomplishment by the Heritage Foundation. And I think that’s telling about their role in American politics. It’s still very dangerous and I think anti-democratic in a lot of ways, but I think that conservatives have lost the ability to affect public policy when their leading organization has kind of gone off the rails.
Matt Grossmann: Anything you wanted to add out about what you’re doing next or any last words you want to leave us with?
E.J. Fagan: I’m still looking into think tanks. Every think tank in DC, I’m coming for you, working on some of that. But the next book is probably going to be about why democracies have fewer policy areas than authoritarian countries. Because I want to write a defense of democracy. And I think one of the great defense of democracies is that with all the messiness and protests and the things that don’t occur in some authoritarian countries, governments are really good at detecting problems. And when you can’t detect problems, you don’t solve them. And that’s why you have major disasters that occur in other places. So that that’s the next book. But think tanks are still on the agenda.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all links on our website. Policymakers follow informed expertise. How Congress communicates. How party leaders change Congress. The impact of policy misinformation. And can Democrats design social programs that survive. Thanks to E.J. Fagan for joining me. Please check out The Thinkers and then listen in next time.