Political crises can, conceivably, allow for the emergence of new voices in the public conversation. Chile’s experience since 2011—beginning with mass student mobilizations, followed by corruption scandals, the 2019 social uprising, and successive constitutional processes—would seem a textbook case. A period of profound contestation over the country’s development model generated unprecedented demand for policy narratives. However, the outcome proved more ambiguous. While new actors and organizations did emerge, success came overwhelmingly to those already embedded in elite networks.
This article asks: What determined Chilean think tanks’ divergent trajectories during this period of political crisis (2011–2022)? To answer this, I develop the concept of intellectual infrastructure—the material, institutional, technological, and network conditions behind the production of interventions in the policy debate—building a database of interventions from nine key organizations, complemented by interviews with think tank members and stakeholders across politics, media, academia, and funding. The article reveals how advantages in funding and media access became cumulative and self-reinforcing, creating concentration despite the country’s population becoming richer, more educated, and more demanding of policy evidence. This research advances a political sociology of knowledge by focusing on a country that has experienced profound social transformations and one where the supply of and demand for expertise have increased enormously (Landry Reference Landry2021).
This article fills gaps in the literature on think tanks in general and Chile in particular, focusing on a medium-income Latin American country that neither has a diversified philanthropic tradition nor is a priority recipient of international development funds. Instead of trying to measure think tanks’ policy influence, as much of the literature does, I study how their products vary over time. Working under the notion that think tanks’ fortunes reflect changes in their environment, I present quantitative and qualitative data to argue that the demand for their outputs and the competition they face have increased significantly since 2011—a year that saw the emergence of the generation of student leaders that came to power in 2022. By then, Chile had seen three changes of government, the latest of which broke the alternation between traditional center-left and center-right coalitions, as well as important waves of protests and the beginning of a series of failed constitutional reform attempts.
The implications of this case study extend beyond Chile. They allow us to refine dominant theories of think tanks, particularly Medvetz’s (Reference Medvetz2012). While he describes how think tanks carved an interstitial space between fields, this study examines the opposite: how they are themselves shaped by transformations in the fields they partake in. Furthermore, observing a middle-income country with concentrated elite networks suggests that the boundaries between fields may be more porous than often assumed. By tracing think tanks’ differential capacity to produce interventions over time, this research documents how they can crowd out competitors. This last point helps explain an apparent paradox: even as the supply and demand for expert opinion expanded, established organizations consolidated their position.
In practical terms, this article collects the interventions—that is, texts that constitute speech acts that seek to inform policy debates—of nine think tanks. I include reports, books, bulletins, briefs, podcasts, and blogs, but because of their volume, media-related products predominate. These interventions are used to detect intellectual and institutional changes, particularly concerning volume and the audiences they seek to (and can) reach. In addition, this article draws from sixty-six interviews conducted between May 2022 and December 2023.
The structure of this article is as follows. It first covers the general literature on think tanks and where this article contributes. Next, it addresses existing research on the topic in Latin America and Chile. Then I describe this paper’s methodology, which is followed by its findings, structured around three themes: key junctures, organizational capacity, and demand. These three dimensions answer different aspects of the research question: junctures reveal how political crises created opportunities and constraints; organizational capacity examines how think tanks responded with the resources at their disposal; and demand analyzes how access to media and funding shaped their trajectories. I conclude by examining how the development of Chilean think tanks reflects the country’s transformations more broadly and the institutions that sustain its policy debate.
Fields, interventions, and infrastructures
In recent decades, the influence of think tanks has become both greater and more difficult to ascertain. Once almost exclusive to the English-speaking world, today they are present and significant across the world. With this expansion, the contours of what defines them have become murkier and their roles more varied.
Most early literature on the subject—mainly from North American political science (McGann et al. Reference McGann, Viden and Rafferty2014)—focused on three issues: how to define and classify think tanks, how to measure their impact, and their independence. Medvetz’s groundbreaking Think Tanks in America (Reference Medvetz2012) largely superseded these questions by applying Bourdieu’s field theory and Eyal’s (Reference Eyal and Philip2013) concept of space between fields. Medvetz argues that think tanks are hybrid organizations working at the intersection of fields, and therefore strict definitions or typologies risk excluding relevant organizations and exaggerating their stability. Instead, we should focus on what they do rather than what they are—especially since they have no common legal definition or business model.
According to Medvetz, think tanks participate in at least four fields: politics, economics, media, and academia. They translate different types of capital beyond their traditional context: mobilizing the prestige of universities to influence politicians; using media-friendly language when writing policy reports, and so on. For these reasons, Medvetz frames their independence not as a normative issue, but as an empirical one through the prism of fields—is a think tank more interested in appeasing donors, political allies, academic peers, or editors?
While Medvetz’s framework remains invaluable, his emphasis on think tanks’ hybridity risks exaggerating field autonomy, especially where elite networks are concentrated and fields less consolidated. In countries with smaller elite circles, field boundaries can be porous. The same corporations and individuals that control major media outlets often have strong political connections and constitute the main source of domestic philanthropy (Undurraga Reference Undurraga2015). This is especially so where the pool of potential funders, media gatekeepers, and political interlocutors is small, although it is not uncommon elsewhere—studies of global elite networks have shown as much (Carroll, Reference Carroll2010). In Chile, this interconnectedness is exemplified by organizations such as Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), whose boards include major corporate elites (Morales-Martín et al. Reference Morales-Martín, Videla-Rocha and Ibacache-Monasterio2023).
In parallel, recent advances in the sociology of intellectuals have moved away from seeking to define what an intellectual is toward examining intellectual interventions (Baert Reference Baert2012; Eyal and Buchholz Reference Eyal and Buchholz2010). In what amounts to a “performative turn,” these scholars focus on the production and effects of interventions rather than on the normative or descriptive characteristics of intellectuals. An intervention refers to any communicative act that positions a given person or organization in relation to an issue of public concern. Its roots are in the idea of a speech act (Austin Reference Austin1962) that does not merely represent the world but also acts upon it.
Focusing on intellectual interventions as a unit of analysis can also be methodologically fruitful. Interventions can take many forms, from media appearances to written texts, as well as statistics and other nonverbal forms of communication (Eyal and Levy Reference Eyal, Levy, Mata and Steven2013). This idea becomes particularly useful when combined with Ladi’s (Reference Ladi and Papanagnou2011) distinction between coordinative and communicative discourse. The former refers to output aimed at relatively restricted publics directly involved in the policy process (e.g., reports). The latter seeks to influence broader audiences and change what Denham and Garnett (Reference Denham and Garnett1998) call the “climate of opinion” (e.g., op-eds).
According to Ladi (Reference Ladi and Papanagnou2011), communicative discourse is more likely to predominate when think tanks are far from power, whereas coordinative discourse dominates when they are close. An organization’s ability to navigate between them reveals much about its position in the policy debate and its institutional capacity in different moments of the political cycle. On that note, Rich (Reference Rich2004) has also shown how US think tanks gradually shifted their priorities from nonpartisan expertise toward aggressive advocacy and marketing, fundamentally altering the role of experts in policy debates.
Through their capacity to produce both coordinative and communicative discourse, think tanks reflect and shape what I call the intellectual infrastructure of the policy debate: the institutional arrangements, networks, resources, and technologies that make interventions possible. Although the concept of intellectual infrastructure has been used elsewhere (Frischmann Reference Frischmann2012), it mostly refers to copyright law, to what I refer to as epistemic, as done in passing (Jezierska Reference Jezierska and Laruelle2023). While recent work on epistemic infrastructures has examined how knowledge about the world is produced, measured, and disseminated (Tichenor et al. Reference Tichenor, Merry, Grek and Bandola-Gill2022), by “intellectual infrastructure” I refer to the conditions behind the production and dissemination of interventions. In other words, epistemic infrastructures refer to the institutions and technologies through which societies produce knowledge about themselves and are often state led (e.g., universities, statistics agencies). Meanwhile, intellectual infrastructure refers to the conditions underlying interventions in a public debate. I also expect this concept to contribute to the sociology of intellectuals by adding a sociological base that a purely performative view of interventions risks lacking.
The distinction between epistemic and intellectual also sheds light on how the production of policy knowledge depends on epistemic tools and on arrangements that determine which voices are considered “serious” enough. While modern communication technologies theoretically democratize the ability to intervene publicly, intellectual infrastructures shape which interventions are broadly recognized as legitimate contributions. This legitimacy stems from complex interactions between academic credentials, institutional affiliations, media connections, adroit language, and symbolic capital—what Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1991) called the right to speak.
Think tanks themselves help construct and maintain these hierarchies of expertise through their capacity to translate between academia, politics, and the media (not to mention funding). To be sure, they are but one building block of that infrastructure, but given their hybrid character and centrality in the formation of policy networks (Tchilingirian Reference Tchilingirian2018), they are a fruitful starting point. Stone (Reference Stone, Fischer, Miller and Sidney2007) showed that think tanks are often key brokers that translate and legitimate expertise across policy communities. After all, the infrastructure I speak of is not purely academic but it encompasses academia and it is different from the media but connected to it.
Intellectual infrastructure (or infrastructures) has at least four dimensions.Footnote 1 First, material resources: stable funding that allows for organizational survival, organizing events, publications, and broader initiatives, but most crucially, for contracting staff and granting staff time to intervene. Second, technologies: advances and diffusion of telecommunications and informational technologies that allow for interventions to be made, archived, vetted, and perceived. Third, network formation: relationships between intervenors and others (media gatekeepers, political actors, academic institutions) that determine whose interventions circulate. Fourth, institutional arrangements: governance structures, legal status, and organizational stability providing legitimacy, continuity, juridical personhood, and protection. This includes the legal frameworks that sustain intellectual freedoms and democratic rights (Jackson Reference Jackson2021). These dimensions ultimately develop into a quantum of credibility for intervenors (i.e., symbolic capital). Crucially, they are also cumulative and self-reinforcing: media access requires credibility; building credibility requires time; time requires resources; resources depend on networks.
Intellectual infrastructures also help explain why some think tanks can intervene more than others, given their differential access to funding sources, media platforms, and policy networks. This resonates with a Gramscian tradition in think tank studies that argues that their goal is to, by repetition, convince “secondhand dealers in ideas,” who in turn influence a broader common sense (Desai Reference Desai1994; Pautz Reference Pautz2012).
In a country like Chile, which lacks both a developed domestic philanthropic tradition and priority access to international development funds, its intellectual infrastructure becomes particularly visible in its constraints. Which think tanks can thrive and access secure funding shapes which kinds of interventions are possible. Understanding these conditions helps explain both the life cycles of think tanks and their role in shaping how societies deliberate about their future.
Think tanks and Chile’s social transformation
Compared to their US peers, Latin American think tanks diverge in their origins, governance, and political role. Rather than emerging (at least normatively) at arm’s length from politics, from the beginning, they have been influenced by partisan networks, authoritarian contexts, and university displacement (Mendizabal and Sample Reference Mendizabal and Sample2009). Comparative scholarship identifies several factors shaping regional variation: party system institutionalization (Mendizabal and Sample Reference Mendizabal and Sample2009); historical experiences that structure different waves of think tanks (e.g., developmentalist, postdictatorship; [Uña and Garcé Reference Uña and Garcé2007]), funding ecologies (Hauck Reference Hauck2017), and transnational networks (Fischer and Plehwe Reference Fischer and Plehwe2013). Recent research also documents contemporary pressures: funding precarity, polarization, and crises of expertise (OnThinkTanks 2024). There are also many case studies, some of which I cite later. Yet there are few or no systematic analyses of organizational life cycles or explanations for why some expand while others decline.
This article addresses these gaps through three innovations. The first is conceptual, described above. Second, by tracking interventions over time, it provides a longer-term analysis—connecting interventions and organizational evolution—that is absent from regional scholarship and rare elsewhere. Third, it covers a period of drastic social change, following the evolution of the sector vis-à-vis Chile itself. The country’s relatively strong yet economically precarious think tank environment, high institutionalization, and rapid development render it information-rich for testing theories developed from cross-sectional snapshots.
Chile is a middle-income country whose economy has grown rapidly since its return to democracy in 1990. It has a long tradition of social science and policy research from extramural organizations that dates to the end of World War II. Then, international institutions such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Latin American Faculty of Social Science (FLACSO) turned Santiago into one of the most important social science research hubs outside Europe and North America.
Their evolution was, expectably, truncated by the 1973 coup d’état. However, and counterintuitively, the coup did not end Chile’s think tank sector. Arguably, it strengthened it. Universities were under close surveillance and political parties were proscribed, but social sciences were not themselves outlawed. After all, this was a dictatorial regime whose legitimacy derived partly from the technocratic credentials of its civil collaborators (Valdés Reference Valdés2022). Social scientists who could not be employed by universities or the state found refuge in third-sector organizations of a technocratic or apolitical persuasion (Brunner and Flisfisch Reference Brunner and Flisfisch2014). Furthermore, thanks to the support of international development agencies and political foundations, think tanks could thrive and provide an ersatz policy debate, fostering the networks that later became the Concertación, the left-of-center coalition that governed between 1990 and 2010.
Those twenty years under Concertación governments saw the weakening or disappearance of most think tanks that had emerged in the 1980s. As the country developed—Chile joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2010 and, according to the World Bank, became a high-income economy in 2012—international funding dried up without producing a philanthropic ecosystem to support such organizations. By way of illustration, the Ford Foundation, which had opened its Latin America headquarters in Santiago in 1959, left in 2016 for Bogotá (Morales-Martin Reference Morales-Martín2018). This institutional vacuum created a divide between organizations that could secure stable corporate funding and those dependent on declining international sources.
Still, noteworthy left-of-center think tanks of the period include the Corporación de Estudios para Latinoamérica (CIEPLAN, est. 1976), which had formed many of the economists of the Concertación but lately has lost momentum (Maillet et al. Reference Maillet, Toro, Olivares and Ignacia Rodríguez2016); Chile21 (est. 1992), which represented the left of the Concertación and was behind Ricardo Lagos’s presidential bid (2000–2006); and the short-lived Expansiva, which brought together many of the future ministers of the first Bachelet period (2006–2010).
On the right, Libertad y Desarrollo (LyD, established in 1991), focused on economic policy and linked to parliamentary work, and Centro de Estudios Públicos (established in 1980), a semiacademic organization, established themselves as crucibles for the policy debate. They were aided by generous corporate funding, twenty years in opposition (which allowed them to develop organizational capacity without suffering attrition to the state), and easy access to media and political elites.
In 2011, the student social movements emerged, which called into question the political agreement behind Chile’s transition to democracy, especially concerning the tolerability of economic inequality and the importance of consensus seeking in politics. These trends have since become increasingly evident, especially after the October 2019 protests and the constitutional process(es) that followed. The 2011–2022 period also brought the foundation of Frente Amplio—a coalition to the left of the Concertación that became government in 2022—along with antielite movements from across the spectrum, the emergence of social media, the mass expansion of higher education (Fleet Reference Fleet2021), and corruption scandals affecting both mainstream coalitions (Luna Reference Luna2016).
These changes had two seemingly contradictory effects. They increased the demand for policy experts while repoliticizing the policy debate. In this context, older think tanks had to reevaluate their role, applying their expertise for or against the demands of new political actors. This manifested in a series of leadership changes at the CEP, in a decline of traditional organizations such as CIEPLAN, and in the emergence of new institutions with varying degrees of success—such as Espacio Público (established in 2013), an attempt to bring together technocratic elites of the center-left.
This situation also opened space for a new generation of think tanks. On the left, an interesting case is that of Fundación Sol (established in 2007), which combined the technical skills of young social scientists with a strong social media presence. This was made possible by the growing amount of data the Chilean state and the OECD produced about the country (i.e., the development of its epistemic infrastructure) and technological change (social media). Another fascinating case is that of Nodo XXI (established in 2012), the intellectual nucleus of the Frente Amplio. Likewise, new organizations sought to revitalize the right. The Instituto de Estudios de la Sociedad (IES; established in 2007) aimed to distance Chilean conservatives from the Pinochet dictatorship and expand their focus beyond the economy. Meanwhile, Fundación para el Progreso (FPP; established in 2012) sought to defend unfettered free markets and the legacy of the Chicago Boys.
Most studies on Chilean think tanks have focused on their role during 1973–1990 and their role in opposition to the regime (Puryear Reference Puryear1994; Silva Reference Silva2009). The literature on the period that followed has examined: their importance for policy formulation and mediating access to politics (Gárate Reference Gárate2008; Joignant Reference Joignant2011); their effects on agenda setting (Pinilla Reference Pinilla2012; Aedo Reference Aedo2016); their international networks (Álvarez-Rivadulla et al. Reference Álvarez-Rivadulla, Markoff, Montecinos, Garcé and Uña2010; Fischer and Plehwe Reference Fischer and Plehwe2013); and their history (Jara Reference Jara2019). However, there are few recent studies on the impact of political crises on think tanks themselves or on the new wave of policy institutes that came of age after 2011. Partial exceptions include studies on right-wing Chilean think tanks and how they reacted to the 2019 wave of protests (Alenda Reference Alenda2020; Dávila Reference Dávila and Política2020) and a study of the press coverage of think tanks around the 2021–2022 constitutional process (Cortés et al. Reference Cortés, Fergnani, Muñoz and Morales2023).
Cociña and Toro (Reference Cociña, Toro, Mendizábal and Sample2009) highlighted the dearth of studies on think tank life cycles. This article fills precisely this gap. It focuses on organizations themselves to study two phenomena: how they change over time and what these changes say about their environment. Therefore, this research also contributes to the literature on the public role of social-scientific knowledge that has gained momentum in Chile with the development of its social sciences.
Methodology
This article asks, What determined Chilean think tanks’ differential capacity to produce interventions during a period of political crisis and social transformation (2011–2022)? To answer this, it relies on two methods. The first is by building a database of interventions. The second is by putting these results in context through qualitative interviews. Ultimately, by tracking concrete, micro-level interventions, I trace meso-level organizational trajectories that reveal the existence of a macro-level that the concept of intellectual infrastructure captures.
This research employs a mixed-methods, comparative, and diachronic approach. None of the selected think tanks is formally associated with any specific party, although they are well known and easily situated on the political spectrum.Footnote 2 They are all generalists (not circumscribed to a specific policy area); five are part of the same wave, having formed or come of age around 2011, and four survived from previous eras (the dictatorship or right after); and all are operative and visible in the media for most of the period. Table 1 presents them from oldest to youngest.Footnote 3
Think tanks’ key characteristics
Table 1. Long description
The table compares key characteristics of various think tanks, including their establishment year, political position, main funding sources, key areas of focus, key audiences, key products, staff size, and estimated budget for the years 2022-2023. The table has 9 rows and 8 columns. The columns are labeled as Think tank, Est., Political position, Main funding sources, Key areas, Key audiences, Key products, Staff (board), and Est. budget (USD, 2022-2023). The rows list individual think tanks with their respective details. Notable trends include the diversity in political positions, funding sources, and areas of focus among the think tanks. The staff size and estimated budgets also vary significantly across the organizations.
The following R-packages were employed for web scraping: RVest (HTML), Tidyverse (normalization and visualization), and Openxlsx (database). The process was carried out in three stages. First is link list: The structure of the relevant webpage was explored, mapping the page links to determine their scope, quantity, and location. Second is page analysis: After identifying all relevant links, the HTML structure of the page was analyzed to identify where relevant information was located—title, date (month, year), author, thematic tag (if available), media source (if any), and URL. Then a code was created for each webpage. Third is iteration: After writing the relevant code, a function was added for its iteration, resulting in an XLSX file. This was added to a general database that also contained organizational variables (intervention ID, think tank, political sector). I also added a label distinguishing communicative or coordinative discourse, which referred to the format’s key audience—either general or directly involved in the policy process—which was validated through interview questions on products and their targets.
Where information was not available at institutional websites, media sources were used and merged. For example, post-2020, CIEPLAN has many unusable links, so these were supplemented with entries found in fourteen key media sources, well represented in the rest of the database: the broadsheets La Tercera, El Mercurio, La Segunda, and Diario Financiero; the weekly The Clinic; the news sites El Mostrador, El Líbero, El Desconcierto, and El Ciudadano; and the TV and radio sites CNN Chile, Duna, ADN, TeleTrece, and Bio-Bio. Something similar was done for FPP before April 2014, Espacio Público before June 2016, and Nodo XXI before January 2018. Hence, a limitation of this article is that nonmedia intervention may be underrepresented, although some were manually added when identified through Internet Archive and yearly accounts (especially books and reports). With the notable exception of Fundación Sol, think tanks on the right kept better records of their work, which may lead the reader to believe that their superior recordkeeping explains their overrepresentation in the sample. This is true only to a degree, as will be apparent later.
Interviews were semistructured to allow space for think tanks’ institutional diversity. Four members of each of the nine key think tanks were interviewed, targeting the following roles: executive director or president, head of research or division, communications or impact, and junior researcher. Where these profiles were unavailable, I contacted former employees. I focused on these roles because familiarity with the think tank’s evolution, communications strategy, and research priorities was required. However, particularly for older think tanks, speaking with younger members could have helped ascertain the current situation from a more practical and operational standpoint. I also interviewed seven members of think tanks that were recently founded or closed, in order to understand changes in the institutional and funding conditions that allowed (or not) for their emergence and survival.
Twenty-three members of four fields were also contacted: academia (think tank scholars and heads of academic policy centers), politics (board members and politicians), financing (charitable funding, donors, and corporate or trade associations), and media (press and broadcast editors). This was mostly done through snowballing. As this article is mainly about their output, I focus on media contacts and funders.
Interviews with think tank members delved into their organizations’ history, their strategy for intervening in the public debate, the institutional conditions for their subsistence, and their audiences. My approach was mainly narrative, focusing on how interviewees present their work and recent history (Dexter Reference Dexter2006). After all, documents say little on their own about how they are produced (Bowen Reference Bowen2009). The purpose of the shorter stakeholder interviews was similar, focusing on their organizations’ communication with think tanks, their degree of collaboration or competition, and their demands. Interviews were analyzed using a narrative approach (Riessman Reference Riessman2008; Squire et al. Reference Squire, Davis, Esin, Andrews, Harrison, Hydén and Hydén2014), attending to how participants constructed accounts of their organizations’ trajectories and positioning within Chile’s policy debate since 2011. I treat interviewees’ narratives as performances that reveal how actors make sense of and legitimate institutional change. This enabled the examination of both institutional changes and how elite actors frame their organizations’ roles and legitimacy claims during tumultuous times. Access to these organizations was facilitated by my position at a well-known nonpartisan Chilean academic research center.
Findings: Crisis and consolidation of think tanks’ output and influence
The patterns discussed in this section reveal the crystallization of Chile’s intellectual infrastructure—the capacity to produce and disseminate expert interventions became increasingly structured. Figure 1 records the total number of public interventions by think tank per year. Immediately, the dominance of LyD—followed by CEP—is noticeable, as is the rapid growth of IES and FPP, with a relative decline for the latter after 2020. These numbers contrast with those on the left, where numbers are uneven or declining, as only Espacio Público shows steady growth.
Total think tank output per year (all sources)
Figure 1. Long description
The line graph illustrates the total think tank output per year from 2011 to 2022. The x-axis represents the years from 2011 to 2022, while the y-axis represents the output values ranging from 0 to 2000. The graph includes multiple data lines, each representing a different think tank: LyD, C E P, F P P, I E S, C I E P L A N, Chile 21, Fundacion Sol, Nodo XXI, and Espacio Publico. Each line shows the trend of output for the respective think tank over the years. The output values for each think tank vary, with some showing a steady increase, while others fluctuate. All values are approximated.
These figures include many kinds of intervention. A majority correspond to communicative discourse (targeted at a wide, nonspecialist audience) in the form of op-eds and media appearances (14,035 of 18,948). However, some types of coordinative discourse (for policymakers, stakeholders, and other policy experts) are present too, where think tanks with a regular agenda of publications, such as LyD, predominate. The latter publish on a weekly or fortnightly basis the following policy bulletins: Temas Públicos (1,126), Coyuntura Económica (775), and Reseña Legislativa (498). Only in fourth place the bulletin of another think tank appears, CEP’s Puntos de Referencia (301): literature reviews on a topical policy issue. The remainder correspond to specific publication series or shared categories such as books (280), videos (239), presentations (176), policy reports (168), and podcasts (120).
These figures also show that the period 2011–2022 saw a general growth in think tanks’ output, shaped by at least three factors: political crises and cycles, a general development in their organizational capacity, increasing but uneven demands from stakeholders. I go over each of these in turn.
Political crises and cycles
Political crises (2011, 2019) and government changes (2014, 2018, 2022) were crucial for these organizations. In 2010, after two decades of left-of-center dominance, the formation of a right-wing government opened a space for its think tanks to join its cabinet. An illustrative case is LyD. Initially, its work was primarily coordinative, and it self-identified as comprising experts bringing evidence to technocratic policy debates. Their experience is encapsulated by this quote:
I was the government’s counterpart [in 2009]. Then we entered the first Piñera period … and this is very funny because the same people who were previously in government became the opposition and I, who was first in opposition, joined government but met the same people…. The only difference was who took off their tie and who had to put it on.Footnote 4
However, 2011 saw a massive wave of student protests, representing a normative challenge to Chile’s development model. LyD’s output noticeably shifted from a narrow focus on coordinative to producing more communicative discourse. Only 8 percent of LyD’s output in 2011 was in the form of opinion, which grew to 45 percent in 2014 (when the right left government) and remained steady, accounting for 47 percent in 2022. LyD interviewees interpret this period as one in which polarization threatened to erode Chile’s technocratic consensus and institutional solidity.
Across the aisle, 2011 provided opportunities for Fundación Sol to raise its profile. The foundation began with a small team working on labor affairs in 2007, initially as part of Chile’s largest union federation. Later the team disaffiliated and had to survive independently, gathering another team of young social scientists adept at analyzing official statistics and advising trade unions. Their skills, in addition to the Chilean state’s growing capacity to produce data, allowed them to illustrate the extent of Chile’s inequality through simple graphs, and nascent social media helped their quick dissemination. They could have a great impact with relatively few resources:
[In] 2011 with the student movement, our social networks began to explode. [W]e began [to] do data analysis quickly, coming up with a figure and starting to activate the debate, for example around salaries … at that time people only talked about averages [and] we began to introduce the concept of the median, to the point that later, I don’t know if it was us, but the [National Institute of Statistics], which had never done so before, began to publish medians.Footnote 5
Fundación Sol’s initial success showed how new channels could temporarily bypass traditional gatekeepers, although maintaining influence would prove challenging. For a while, Fundación Sol gained visibility, even rivaling the output of much better-provisioned think tanks. Meanwhile, established institutions associated with the Concertación, such as CIEPLAN and Chile21, struggled to attract new generations. For instance, Chile21 had a series of political schools, yet around 2011, an interviewee says:
We saw a certain erosion…. The mystique … the convictions, what we believed should … frame a school of … young people who wanted to … transform …, politically, the country, society; that was taking a backseat to becoming more of a place … to make networks, to strengthen ties…. For me this deteriorated the spirit of what should be a political training school, also being of less interest because the Concertación itself was weakening…. Young people … did not opt for the parties and leaders of the Concertación and were creating their own leaders and their own organizations.Footnote 6
Nodo XXI was one such organization. Founded in 2012 by law and social science student leaders, the organization provided a platform for what would become the Frente Amplio (which entered government in 2022). However, most of its publications were oriented toward ideological reflection rather than media presence, which changes slightly at the end of the time frame under study. In its own words:
Nodo XXI … is first linked to the … student movement, not only in a sense of constructing proposals to dispute different institutional spaces, but also with the objective of helping inform … a left whose development was interrupted by the dictatorship…. At that time there was no Frente Amplio, but there were social movements that were constituting … alternatives to the traditional parties of the 90s and 2000s.Footnote 7
On the right, new think tanks sought to answer the emergent left’s challenge. IES was founded in 2007 with a conservative Catholic ethos, its main mission being student outreach. However, it detected a demand for right-wing ideas that went beyond free markets and tackled Chile’s problems more broadly. Importantly, its members were social science and humanities graduates rather than economists or lawyers, and IES is still characterized by its focus on books and op-eds rather than policy work.
Meanwhile, FPP, founded with support from a few large donors, had the explicit objective of defending Chile’s free-market model. It is dedicated to decrying the politics of envy, elaborated by its first director, Axel Kaiser, through op-eds in Diario Financiero and his book The Fatal Ignorance. He argued that the Chilean right had neglected the defense of free markets in moral terms. Over the years, FPP has cultivated an antagonistic tone, the bulk of its work consisting of op-eds, social media, and student initiatives. An interviewee said:
FPP was created as a reaction to the student movement, [which] came to redefine the parameters of what the left was … What the student movement allowed was the existence of a left that was not technocratic but rather cultural. And that was [a] phenomenon that greatly validated Axel’s diagnosis … of the cultural precariousness on the right…. What 2019 was based on is not very different, which in truth is nothing more than a crystallization of the entire ten-year process.Footnote 8
Meanwhile, CEP, arguably Chile’s best provisioned and most institutionally robust think tank, provided both policy recommendations and a venue for debates cutting across political divides. It was the first right-of-center think tank to host meetings between student leaders and politicians in 2011. However, it could not remain completely outside the fray. A series of leadership changes—including high-ranking politicians rotating between government and CEP in the first Piñera period—as well as scandals surrounding board members (La Tercera 2015)—meant that, though CEP remained prominent, it lost its near monopoly over highbrow policy advice. Meanwhile, Espacio Público, founded in 2012, brought together disparate parts of the Concertación and technocratic sections of the left. Its catalyst was an international two-year endowment and the near certainty that the center-left would return to power in 2014. That year, many of its members joined government, as they did in 2022.
Toward the end of the time frame here, three events were key: the 2019 protests (which, unlike those in 2011, lacked clear leadership and demands), the constitutional processes that followed, and the beginning of Boric’s government. A few think tanks emerged as a response to these junctures, notably Pivotes in 2022, with one sole donor and strong links to journalists from La Tercera; university-dependent self-declared think tanks (Faro UDD, Signos UANDES, and CLAPES), and party-dependent organizations (Ideas Republicanas and Rumbo Colectivo) whose funding depends on parliamentary representation. However, most of the Chilean think tank scene had already consolidated and had enough recognizability and capacity to occupy much of the public debate. This provided the opportunity to position themselves even more solidly, at least to those with the organizational capacity to react to policy cycles (González Hernando Reference González Hernando2019).
Organizational capacity
Think tanks’ output, business model, size, and governance structures vary widely. What they produce is shaped by their audiences, funders, and resources. Still, their environment can swiftly change, and long-term planning must be balanced with the capacity to respond to short-term shocks. As a rule, think tanks with core—as opposed to project-based—funding have greater capacity to focus on short and long-term interventions (e.g., op-eds, books), and they enjoy some flexibility over their research agenda. Whether that option or project-based funding is more vulnerable to accusations of intellectual dependence is another matter.
A good example of a core-funded think tank that grew steadily is IES. IES had a clear media strategy, fostering the profile of specific authors that would intervene on its behalf and positioning the acronym across the media. Figure 2 shows the importance of one author toward the beginning of the sample (Pablo Ortúzar), while others (Daniel Mansuy, Claudio Alvarado, Josefina Araos) gained recognizability as time went on. One researcher said:
All researchers have some participation in the media, even new ones. The first thing a new researcher does is to begin as a columnist in one of the media outlets with whom we have an institutional alliance, where they don’t appear because of their signature but because there is a space for IES…. The objective is for you to position yourself as a relevant voice in those media, so you end up with your signature, as an IES researcher … with a regular space in a national media outlet.Footnote 9
IES output per year (by author)
Figure 2. Long description
A line graph showing the IES output per year by different authors from 2011 to 2022. The x-axis represents the years from 2011 to 2022, and the y-axis represents the output values ranging from 0 to 100. The graph includes multiple dashed lines, each representing a different author: Pablo Ortúzar, Claudio Alvarado, Daniel Mansuy, Josefina Araos, Joaquín Castillo, Guillermo Pérez Ciudad, Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Catalina Siles, Manfred Svensson, and Mariana Canales. Pablo Ortúzar’s line shows a significant increase from 2011 to 2022, peaking around 2020. Claudio Alvarado’s line also shows a notable increase, peaking around 2021. Other authors have varying levels of output, with some showing peaks in specific years and others maintaining relatively steady levels. All values are approximated.
Think tanks’ output is also affected by who is in government. This is especially so in a relatively small country with a growing policy elite—as the proportion of the population with tertiary degrees and the number of relevant political actors expanded. As a rule, being in opposition benefits think tanks, with the partial exception of mostly media-oriented organizations with core funding and whose main objective is not producing coordinative discourse. Examples of these include IES and FPP, where only FPP board members (who are generally more senior and not directly employed by the organization) ever joined a government.
Political shifts to the left (Bachelet in 2014, Boric in 2022) and to the right (Piñera in 2010 and 2018) come accompanied by shifts from coordinative discourse when in government to more critical stances when in opposition (Barreda et al. Reference Barreda, Rodríguez and Medero2023). As fieldwork was carried out in 2022–2023, under Boric’s administration, interviewees from left-leaning think tanks mentioned a severe loss of capacity:
They leave our foundations quite weakened…. Many people who drove our capabilities … went to work for government. It’s a problem, but it’s inevitable, with the enormous challenge that is having a government of a process that we have been part of since its origin.Footnote 10
Longer-term generational change also plays a role. CIEPLAN is widely cited as the economic architect of the Concertación governments and is arguably, with competition from CEP and LyD, the most important think tank in Chile’s history. However, CIEPLAN is currently mostly defunct. It never managed to foster new cadres. Its website has remained frozen since 2020. The mood at its forty-year anniversary in 2016 was celebratory of its historical importance, and former presidents of Chile and Brazil spoke, but there were moments of uncomfortable silence when discussing the organization’s future (CIEPLAN 2016). Although today CIEPLAN retains some visibility, this is mainly because its members continue to enjoy ample coverage. An interviewee said:
CIEPLAN is disappearing. Basically, CIEPLAN remained [for a long time] a structure that has one or two researchers who have their own … baseline financing, based on projects of [organizations such as] the EU or the UN. And it’s the institution to which the CIEPLAN ‘boys’ return…. If they leave a ministry, they return to CIEPLAN. If they leave the Central Bank, they return to CIEPLAN … CIEPLAN is like a parking space where people can stay, they have a certain intellectual climate, they have minimal base funding. And from there they can reinvent themselves either as academics, and from there go to a university, or … back to the political world.Footnote 11
This pattern reveals how organizations without new personnel and a secure funding base can lose their capacity to intervene consistently, even while retaining prestigious individuals. What had once been institutional influence gradually became reduced to personal networks.
Espacio Público drew from that experience. As many of its initial members had an established academic and political profile (including former CIEPLAN members), the organization was visible since its inception. Three other crucial characteristics allowed it to retain centrality. First, unlike most other Chilean think tanks, Espacio Público is competitive in international research grant applications, which helped it survive beyond its initial endowment and means it can produce medium-term, comparative work (and hence its focus is not exclusively on Chile). Second, it is structured around a large board of unpaid directors (mostly academics), which allows it to tap into their skill sets on an ad hoc basis. Third, its founders were familiar with the history of Expansiva and CIEPLAN and mindful of securing its long-term survival. The only other organizations that rival the solidity of this institutional design are LyD and CEP, which rely on a large base of corporate funding and, in the case of the second, a well-designed endowment. This uneven landscape occasionally enables cross-ideological collaboration, though still within the boundaries of the center. For example, in 2017 four of the think tanks cooperated on state modernization, though with asymmetries in influence (Arévalo et al. Reference Arévalo, Morales and Cortés2024).
Demand
Figures 3 and 4 show changes in the media sources publishing these organizations (n ≥ 5 per source). As before, differences in volume, breadth, and visibility of these sources are telling and mostly structured along the left-right axis. These patterns of media access, once established, tended to become self-reinforcing—with regular columns and established relationships making it progressively harder for newer voices to gain comparable platforms. On the left, only CIEPLAN (and to a lesser degree Espacio Público) can regularly access mainstream sources, where right-leaning think tanks appear frequently.
Right-leaning think tanks’ media output by outlet
Figure 3. Long description
The image contains four line graphs, each representing the media output by various outlets for four Chilean think tanks from 2011 to 2021. The think tanks are Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), Libertad y Desarrollo (LyD), Instituto de Estudios de la Sociedad (IES), and Fundación Para el Progreso (FPP). Each graph shows the number of media outputs on the y-axis and the years on the x-axis. The graphs are stacked vertically, with each think tank’s data displayed separately. The lines in each graph represent different media outlets, with varying levels of media output over the years. The data shows trends, peaks, and fluctuations in media output for each think tank and outlet. All values are approximated.
Left-leaning think tanks’ media output by outlet
Figure 4. Long description
The image contains five separate line graphs, each representing different left-leaning think tanks in Chile: CIEPLAN, Chile 21, Fundacion Sol, Nodo XXI, and Espacio Publico. Each graph shows the media output by various outlets from 2011 to 2021. The x-axis represents the years, while the y-axis represents the number of media outputs. Each line within the graphs represents a different media outlet, with a legend on the right side indicating which outlet each line corresponds to. The graphs show fluctuations in media output over the years, with notable peaks and troughs. For instance, CIEPLAN shows a significant peak around 2019, while Chile 21 and Fundacion Sol show more consistent increases over time. Nodo XXI and Espacio Publico also exhibit peaks around 2019.
Chile’s media is structured around a few large groups: El Mercurio SAP (El Mercurio, Las Últimas Noticias, La Segunda, Emol, and regional papers), formerly owned outlets (ADN Radio), and close allies (El Líbero, founded by a former editor); COPESA (La Tercera, La Cuarta, Pulso, Qué Pasa) and indirect affiliates (Duna, Ex-Ante); international corporations such as Paramount (CNN Chile, Chilevisión); and other economic actors, such as Grupo Luksic (Canal 13), Grupo Claro (Diario Financiero, Capital), and businessman Jorge Ergas (since 2020, The Clinic). This is supplemented by smaller independent online outlets (CIPER, El Mostrador, El Ciudadano, Interferencia) and one state-owned broadcaster (TVN). The first two groups control about 80 percent of national newspaper circulation and have clear affinities to business interests (PNUD 2024). This concentration reinforces a public agenda coherent with elite interests and contributes to what Undurraga et al. (Reference Undurraga, Chateau, Joignant, Fergnani and Márquez2023) identify as an “elite bubble.” No independent sources provide a significant counterweight.
The comparison between IES and Fundación Sol is illustrative. In 2011, both were small organizations that published mostly in El Mostrador. By 2022, IES had a regular space in key national outlets. Meanwhile, Fundación Sol saw its output steadily dwindle and focused instead on its bread and butter, advising trade unions. On the reasons behind that decline, one member said:
There’s … the political color of the government. I think … that when they’re a right-wing source, they feel like it’s necessary to have a source that polemicizes and consider that the Fundación Sol can fulfill that role…. It also has to do with the fact that the media is … entirely financed by [corporate funding]. We have learned this from journalists … we have received a notice that we are banned….
Why was there an open space in the first place? Why wasn’t it always closed?
I think it coincided with the political situation…. [E]specially in the case of the 2011 movement, it happened that windows of political opportunity opened.Footnote 12
What began as relatively equal access to social media and emergent online platforms gradually gave way to more structured patterns of inclusion. The overall supply of expert opinion expanded as think tanks carved a niche for themselves, becoming recognizable fixtures in Chile’s policy debates. However, this niche was shaped by uneven access to funding and media space. Hence the growing capacity of some to produce interventions even as they enter government. One broadsheet editor said:
[It’s] much easier for us to [get op-eds from] center-right think tanks … Traditionally, it wasn’t like that…. Now what we are seeing in Chile at least is that … more spaces for reflection and think tanks are being created [in] the center-right. Because … in the center-left today what we have is Espacio Público, and then we have small think tanks [such as] Nodo XXI … but they still don’t have two things: the [public] presence … and the density—and that is an opinion … they don’t offer it in texts for the media. I don’t know about their academic work, but for the media they do not offer the reflective density one seeks.Footnote 13
This perception of density itself reflects how established organizations had shaped expectations of what constituted legitimate intervention that are not purely academic—from writing style and choice of evidence to modes of argumentation.
Regarding funding, Chile’s third-sector regulation does not require the disclosure of sources or public accounts, which means that some think tanks can benefit from a generous yet opaque base of core funding. This grants them the capacity to produce regular, short-term, and long-term interventions, as opposed to needing to rely on project-based grants that generally come from dwindling international sources. Still, there is competition over resources on the right, as the pool of donors is small. These two quotes are worth presenting at length:
There is more competition and therefore … the problem is that in general [right-wing think tanks] always find themselves asking the same people. There are no, so to speak, financiers of IES, financiers of CEP, and financiers of FJG as separate subsets, but as sets that intersect…. With this emergence of more competition, there has also been a greater squeeze.”Footnote 14
[Funding] is a headache for NGOs. Especially for the … center-left, because in general on the right capital supports these things…. Philanthropy in Chile is low and those who do philanthropy do not want to antagonize the government. So it’s a tremendous problem who finances this thing: international organizations perhaps but Chile in the international context is not a subject of beneficence; resources go to another type of country—except for institutions such as [German Stiftung], but they do not finance directly but rather lend you venues, help you with events.Footnote 15
Access to resources operated differently across the political spectrum. While right-wing organizations competed for a limited but stable set of wealthy donors, those on the left struggled to find any sustainable funding source. In sum, in Chile economic growth and social change came with its think tanks’ uneven development. This explains the few incentives Chilean think tanks have to produce original, report-based, medium-term research.
Conclusions
This article’s central finding is that even as demand for expert opinion expanded and allowed for new voices to emerge, a relatively open space increasingly stabilized into patterns of advantage and exclusion. The years we covered, in Chile and beyond, were crucial for at least two reasons: technological and political. Regarding the first, the emergence of social media initially democratized access to public debate. However, established players eventually learned to employ new platforms while maintaining greater access to traditional media, funding networks, and institutional backing. Technology’s democratizing potential proved temporary. Regarding politics, Chile experienced a deep crisis of trust in institutions. The postdictatorship settlement—built around technocratic consensus, gradual reforms, and elite accommodation—fractured after 2011.
My interest in think tanks is primarily because they are particularly sensitive to their environment, providing a fruitful starting point to understand politics and society more broadly. Here the concept of waves proves essential. Think tank waves are generally structured around moments that share social, economic, and political characteristics that favor particular types of institutions—that is, the three periods of before, during, and after the dictatorship correspond to three distinct think tank waves.
After 2011, Chile entered a new cycle. The student movement challenged not just specific policies but the entire development model. On the left, this created space for Nodo XXI and Fundación Sol while undermining CIEPLAN. However, by 2019, there were clear limits to what could be founded. The space available for expert opinion had crystallized. On the right they professionalized their output, and on the left, critiques of Chile’s development model took specific organizational shapes, occupying that niche. Indeed, 2019 revealed both the reach and the limitations of Chile’s intellectual infrastructure. While established actors could rapidly produce interventions, recent analysis suggests that most took an essayistic rather than reflexive or empirical form, raising questions over the relationship between institutional capacity and analytical rigor (Joignant and Garrido-Vergara Reference Joignant and Garrido-Vergara2025).
These dynamics are relevant beyond Chile. For example, in comparing Chilean and Uruguayan “political knowledge regimes,” Garcé et al. (Reference Garcé, D’Avenia, Burian and Villegas Plá2018) found that, despite differences in how expertise circulates, both contexts exhibit concentration around well-resourced organizations. Salas-Porras (Reference Salas-Porras, Salas-Porras and Murray2017) shows that Mexico’s think tank ecosystem has consolidated, after a period of state retrenchment, around a dense, corporate-funded network of organizations that command disproportionate media access and lobbying influence. In Argentina, Morresi and Vommaro (Reference Morresi and Vommaro2015) argue that, following the 2001 crisis, right-of-center networks coalesced around a party, PRO, which had substantial influence over what they call the “NGO faction”—new, densely connected promarket think tanks. In each case, political transitions offered opportunities for new organizations to emerge, which were ultimately capitalized by the best funded and connected.
The concept of waves suggests that think tank development follows recognizable patterns tied to political cycles. Yet Chile’s trajectory also reveals constraints. Few would disagree that Chile’s political landscape shifted after 2019, but changes to the country’s think tank landscape were limited to those who could afford it. Democracy requires not just freedom to intervene, but conditions for diverse actors to even get a hearing.
Acknowledgments
This article is published thanks to the grants Fondecyt Postdoctoral 3210579; COES ANID/FONDAP/1523A0005. The author also thanks Rodrigo Molina for his assistance with web scraping.
Open access
