Recent stories in the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative movement in the U.S. and Britain, and on the changes in store for U.S., British, and European politics. The Times reported on Wednesday on the boom in the Washington DC "ideas industry." Predictably, the Times claims that it’s mostly President Bush’s fault, but, at least in the think tank world, the rising tide does not appear to be lifting all boats.
The Times claims that operating budgets are up at all of D.C.’s top two dozen think tanks, but the big growth is coming at the liberal Brookings Institution, which has grown by 50 percent over the past two years, and the leftish Center for American Progress, now spending $23 million per year after only four years in existence. By contrast, the conservative American Enterprise Institute budget in 2007 was no higher, at $24 million, after adjusting for inflation, than it was in 1983. Since 2005, the right-of-center Heritage Foundation has expanded only modestly and the Center for Strategic and International Studies has not grown at all.
But compared with the situation in Britain, American conservatives enjoy a wealth of riches. Thanks to anti-capitalist capitalists like George Soros and Bill Gates, the trends in the U.S. are in favor of the liberals, but there is still a rough balance between the left and the right in Washington. This is all the more remarkable given the vast disparity between the financial resources of the right and the left in the U.S. Think of the asset gap between the Bradley Foundation and the Gates Foundation, for example. And it is a testament to the willingness of the right in the U.S since the 1970’s to invest in people and institutions over the long haul, instead of wasting money on short-term ‘problem fixing’ grants.
The Telegraph‘s survey of the top twelve British think tanks reveals that this (relatively) happy situation does not prevail in the UK. The top six right-of-center British think tanks have a combined annual budget of £3.85 million, less than half that of the top six left of center think tanks, which command £8.2 million. The leading left-of-center institution, the Institute for Public Policy Research, has a budget that is itself larger than all those on the other side of the aisle. Even more startling is that the situation is actually improving: four of the six leading conservative think tanks in the UK have been founded since 2000, roughly paralleling the growth in the liberal ranks in the U.S.
The British think tank sector is thus both young and impoverished: the top twelve think tanks in the UK spend about $24 million per year, about what AEI or the Center for American Progress spent in 2007. That gap is not surprising: the British political system is only relatively open to influences from outside the closed world of the civil service.. The most recent study of think tank growth, from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, shows that while the U.S. has 1776—nice symbolism—think tanks, Western Europe as a whole has only 1198, and the UK is home to 283 of them, the most of any of the countries surveyed. And of course, the financial resources of the U.S. institutions dwarf those of their European counterparts.
The rise of the think tank on the continent of Europe suggests that its politics are changing, in ways that will make its processes—if not necessarily their outcomes—more like those of the U.S. And Britain is leading the way in this cultural shift. In the Anglo-American world, good think tanks are entrepreneurial, but think tanks as a class are reactive: you establish one when you’re losing, not when you’re winning, and you do so because you think it’s possible to challenge the new political establishment. Hence, after the crushing defeat of the Tories in 1997, British conservatives poured money into the quest for new ideas, while Bush’s victories in 2000 and 2004 spurred the left in the U.S.
In the UK, the conservatives have a long way to go, but they are at least headed in the right direction. Today, it’s the U.S. that looks the gloomiest: if the financial rise of the liberal think tanks means that the left has finally figured out that the key to success is supporting people and ideas over the long term, the conservative movement could be losing an edge it has relied on since Reagan’s victory in 1980.