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EU Think Tanks: Innovation, Independence and Impact

  • Think tanks have become taken-for-granted actors in contemporary governance, both inside but also beyond nation-states. This dissertation tackles the research puzzles of innovativeness, independence and impact for policy institutes operating at EU level. It argues that EU think tanks such as Bruegel or Centre for European Policy Studies inhabit a transnational organizational field, clustered in Brussels but extended beyond. What is the novelty behind their organizational forms and practices? Which leeway of action do they have in practice, given their funding and human resource situations? And what is the significance of EU think tanks, of their networks and hybrid experts? Against the backdrop of existing studies, these questions are empirically explored in a multi-method research effort: a primary databases on 85 EU think tanks; in-depth data on 39 Brussels-based institutes’ financial, human and symbolic resources; 80 semi-structured expert interviews with EU think tank leaders and core constituencies; network analysis based on biographical data from 2,080 EU think tank professionals; and standardized survey results from 671 randomly sampled European Commission officials asked how they use EU think tanks (24 percent response rate) are presented. EU think tanks, I show, are prime study sites for organizational institutionalist theory. After mapping the present field, its historical emergence and expansion is retraced to discover why and how transnational think tanks organize and behave as they do. At the crossroads of academia, politics, business and media, Brussels institutes’ resource dependencies and think tankers’ backgrounds are scrutinized, as are their sectoral and organizational ties, their roles and professional identity. In filling these empirical and knowledge gaps, conceptual and methodological frontiers of think tank research are pushed, namely on their originality, networks or socio-structural effects - reviving the research agenda on transnational think tanks, upgrading previous accounts of EU think tanks, aligning EU- with the latest advances in US scholarship, and linking the struggle of think tanks – as knowledge-intensive civil society actors in complex task environments – for survival, for legitimacy and impact to institutionalist perspectives.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Patrick Gilroy
Advisor:Helmut K. Anheier
Referee:Woody Powell
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (02/2019)
Publication year:2019
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2019/04/11
Number pages:391
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-2915
Release Date:2019/05/10
Tag:Think tanks; European Union; organizational field; institutionalism; network analysis; institutional logics; non-profit management; knowledge society; global civil society
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2019D006 + 2019D006+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY - 4.0 International
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