This project explores the process by which policy ideas are generated and contested. How are the policy research organizations (e.g., think tanks) that generate various policy ideas organized in different countries? How do they operate and try to influence public policy? How have they changed since the late 1980s? Have they become more or less similar over time? Answers to these questions will be developed through the analysis of in-depth interviews and documents collected from a sample of these organizations in four countries: Denmark, France, Germany, and the United States. In doing so, the research will also test two important theories of organizational and institutional change that have preoccupied social scientists for years. One suggests that groups of organizations in a field tend to converge over time on a common set of practices; the other suggests that they do not and that organizations tend to retain their uniqueness even as they change. Rarely have these theories been tested with qualitative data. Hence, this project offers a unique opportunity not only to determine the degree to which convergence in an organizational field has occurred, but also to identify the mechanisms that are involved. As a result, this research will have several broad impacts. First, it will help us better understand how organizational and institutional change occurs. Second, it will help policy research organizations better understand how their operations compare to their counterparts at home and abroad. Finally, it will offer new insights into an important but much neglected part of democratic policy-making?the process by which new policy ideas are generated in the first place.
