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Think tank

Organization that performs policy research and advocacy

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Think tanks publish articles and studies, and sometimes draft legislation on particular matters of policy or society. This information is then used by governments, businesses, media organizations, social movements, or other interest groups. Think tanks range from those associated with highly academic or scholarly activities to those that are overtly ideological and pushing for particular policies, with a wide range among them in terms of the quality of their research. Later generations of think tanks have tended to be more ideologically oriented.

Modern think tanks began as a phenomenon in the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with most of the rest being established in other English-speaking countries. Before 1945, they focused on the economic issues associated with industrialization and urbanization. During the Cold War, many more American and other Western think tanks were established, which often guided government Cold War policy. Since 1991, more think tanks have been established in non-Western parts of the world. Over half of all think tanks that exist today were established after 1980. As of October 2025, it is said that there are about 6,500 think tanks globally.

History

According to historian Jacob Soll, while the term "think tank" is modern, with its origin "traced to the humanist academies and scholarly networks of the 16th and 17th centuries," evidence shows that, "in Europe, the origins of think tanks go back to the 800s when emperors and kings began arguing with the Catholic Church about taxes. A tradition of hiring teams of independent lawyers to advise monarchs about their financial and political prerogatives against the church spans from Charlemagne all the way to the 17th century, when the kings of France were still arguing about whether they had the right to appoint bishops and receive a cut of their income."

Soll cites as an early example the Académie des frères Dupuy, created in Paris around 1620 by the brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy and also known after 1635 as the cabinet des frères Dupuy. The Club de l'Entresol, active in Paris between 1723 and 1731, was another prominent example of an early independent think tank focusing on public policy and current affairs, especially economics and foreign affairs.

19th century

Several major current think tanks were founded in the 19th century. The Royal United Services Institute was founded in 1831 in London, and the Fabian Society in 1884.

20th century

The oldest United States–based think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1910 by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie charged trustees to use the fund to "hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization." The Brookings Institution was founded shortly thereafter in 1916 by Robert S. Brookings and was conceived as a bipartisan "research center modeled on academic institutions and focused on addressing the questions of the federal government."

After 1945, the number of policy institutes increased, with many small new ones forming to address Cold War geopolitics and post-war reconstruction, aiming to express various issues and policy agendas. Until the 1940s, most think tanks were known only by the name of the institution. During the Second World War, think tanks were often referred to as "brain boxes".

Before the 1950s, the phrase "think tank" did not refer to organizations. From its first appearances in the 1890s up to the 1950s, the phrase was most commonly used in American English to colloquially refer to the braincase or especially in a pejorative context to the human brain itself when commenting on an individual's failings (in the sense that something was wrong with that person's "think tank"). Around 1958, the first organization to be regularly described in published writings as "the Think Tank" (note the title case and the use of the definite article) was the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. However, the Center does not count itself as and is not perceived to be a think tank in the contemporary sense. During the 1960s, the phrase "think tank" was attached more broadly to meetings of experts, electronic computers, and independent military planning organizations. The prototype and most prominent example of the third category was the RAND Corporation, which was founded in 1946 as an offshoot of Douglas Aircraft and became an independent corporation in 1948. In the 1970s, the phrase became more specifically defined in terms of RAND and others. During the 1980s and 1990s, the phrase evolved again to arrive at its broader contemporary meaning of an independent public policy research institute.

For most of the 20th century, such institutes were found primarily in the United States, along with much smaller numbers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe. Although think tanks had also existed in Japan for some time, they generally lacked independence, having close associations with government ministries or corporations. There has been a veritable proliferation of "think tanks" around the world that began during the 1980s as a result of globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of transnational problems. Two-thirds of all the think tanks that exist today were established after 1970 and more than half were established since 1980.

The effect of globalisation on the proliferation of think tanks is most evident in regions such as Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia, where there was a concerted effort by other countries to assist in the creation of independent public policy research organizations. A survey performed by the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program underscores the significance of this effort and documents the fact that most of the think tanks in these regions have been established since 1992.

21st century

As of 2014, there were more than 11,000 of these institutions worldwide. Many of the more established think tanks, created during the Cold War, are focused on international affairs, security studies, and foreign policy.

The median think tank publishes 138 articles a year, albeit there is substantial variation, with the Brookings Institution having published 3,880 reports in 2020 alone. Other prolific publishers include the Wilson Center or the CSIS.

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