Architects of Free-Market Hegemony? Think Tanks’ Political Influence in Comparative Perspective (Argentina and Chile, 1976-2020)

Tomas Gold, Brown University

In the last two decades, literature on neoliberal diffusion started to notice a silent but aggressive global expansion of free-market think tanks across the Global South. But although we know that think tank organizations receive funding from international donors to “spread the liberal creed,” we still do not know under which contexts they are more likely to become influential, and how do their strategies evolve over time depending on these contexts. Drawing upon 120 semi-structured interviews with elites, archival work, and participant observation in public and private events collected during 15 months of fieldwork in Chile and Argentina, I analyze how different cohorts of free-market think tanks have developed mechanisms to generate a consensus for neoliberal ideas and policy since the implementation of the first free-market policy reforms until the present time (1976-2020). I find that think tanks become particularly influential when they are capable of training local advocates of free-market ideas in skills that allow them to move towards influential positions across different social fields. Because other organizations are deeply embedded in competing for the acquisition of capital within specific fields (e.g., political parties in the political field, corporations in the economic field, universities in the intellectual field, etc.), think tanks exploit their position as “boundary organizations” (Medvetz, 2012) to informally establish ties among free-market advocates across different types of professional practices and institutions. On the contrary, in those cases where failed policy reforms led free-market actors to become delegitimized over time, think tanks became agents of cultural production without political leverage. I discuss the consequences of these findings for (a) explaining the reasons why think tanks are able to become hegemonic forces in some countries and not others, and (b) accounting for the prevalence of different strains of neoliberal thought across countries of the Global South.

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 Presented in Session 20. The Dynamics of Finance, Wealth, and Inequality in Macrohistorical Perspective