What’s the value-added of think tanks?

There’s another international relations blogger out there — R.J. Rummel, one of the godfathers of quantitative research in international relations. Rummel is also a persistent and oft-published voice arguing for the monadic version of the democratic peace — in other words, it’s not merely that democracies don’t fight each other, but that democracies are generally less war-prone than other states. [How much evidence is there for this version of the democratic peace?–ed. Rummel — as well as Paul Huth — have generated some interesting findings, but it’s not the majority position of the field, and there are a lot of studies out there arguing that Rummel is wrong.] Rummel is also a libertarian and therefore one would expect him to be sympathetic to Cato’s latest study on economic freedom and conflict. However, he is far from keen on the study — go check out his scathing assessment of the Cato report. He closes with this assessment of Cato: “After reviewing the one study on what I know something about and finding it so poor, it provokes a questioning of their other studies in areas I know less about.” Without signing on to all of Rummel’s critique, it opens the door to a larger question about the value-added of think tanks. This past Friday I was at a meeting in DC on how academics can better transmit foreign policy-relevant ideas to those in the government. One obvious transmission belt is think tanks — the experts who staff these institutions can consume academic research and then generate more policy-specific research based in part on that more abstract research. However, several participants enmeshed in the think tank culture argued that this wasn’t the direction thik tanks were going. Instead, several of them — and Heritage, Cato and the Center for American Progress were the leading examples — had switched their focus from churning out deep policy proposals in favor of op-eds. Indeed, the staffing at many think tanks had shifted, with the communications and PR sides receiving a much larger share of the pie relative to the policy wonks. Anyone who knows anything about organizations recognizes that all bureaucracies like to use quantifiable metrics, and surely op-eds would be one example. And it would be insane to argue that think tanks should forswear the op-ed. But the overall point was that the cost of this change in direction for think tanks was fewer in-depth monographs or books, and more output devoted to the 24-hour news cycle. Some would like this trend to accelerate — one of Matt Yglesias’ themes is that think tanks need to blog more. There was no real discussion about whether this is something that can or should be fixed — so I’ll leave that to the commenters. UPDATE: Yglesias e-mails the following:

For the record, what I had in mind was that blogging would be a good substitute for all the op-ed writing and press release releasing that think thanks do, not hoping that more blogging would crowd out more in-depth research. On the general subject, my unsupported assertion would be that the shift in the wonk/hack balance isn’t endogenous to the think tanks themselves but reflects the development of more disciplined political parties in congress. America’s historically weak party system opened up an unusual amount of space for policy entrepreneurship that’s being killed off as the congressional leadership has grown in importance.