In the last two decades, the number of free-market think tanks focused on articulating conservative political coalitions in the Global South has expanded significantly. However, we still know very little about (i) how these think tanks establish international partnerships with philantropic foundations in the Global North to expand their advocacy strategies, and (ii) why their strategies to make free-market ideas and policies resilient over time are more successful within some countries but not others.
My book project, tentatively titled Architects of Hegemony: The Advocacy Strategies of Free-Market Think Tanks in Latin America, focuses on the key role of think tanks for advancing right-wing politics in the region. During 15 months of fieldwork, I conducted more than 140 interviews with think tank directors and policymakers across nine Latin American countries, the United States, Germany and Spain. I also conducted participant observation at political events, carried out archival research on the strategies of local and international foundations, and collected network data on the evolution of transnational ties between foundations of the Global North and South.
Drawing upon these data, the first part of the book examines how conservative philanthropic foundations from the U.S. and Europe cultivate ties with neoliberal entrepreneurs in Latin America to bolster their domestic influence. I first show that these networks are ideologically diverse, and therefore aim to support different strands of “free-market right.” But Latin American think tanks are more pragmatic and want to multiply their affiliations to increase their sources of funding. This creates a problem of coordination which often leads to the disruption of international partnerships given political disagreements. After mapping and analyzing this network structure, I theorize four different strategies that foundations from the Global North employ to stabilize their international coalitions, based on differences in their capacity to (a) control the agenda of their local partners and (b) coordinate horizontal efforts among partners in each country. I draw upon various empirical examples to show how these different organizational structures help their Latin American partners to advance their local agendas in various ways.
In the second part, I propose a novel theoretical framework to explain how think tank professionals (i) seize short-term opportunities to implement policy reforms and (ii) ensure their long-term resilience. First, I argue that neoliberal professionals leading think tank advocacy must build ideological and professional cohesion to capitalize on the opportunities created by dictators or democratic leaders willing to implement free-market reforms. When these opportunities arise, a high degree of cohesion enables effective policy implementation, even against opposition from within and outside the government. Second, I argue that after implementing neoliberal reforms, these professionals must protect their legacy from those seeking to dismantle it. If they maintained cohesion during policy reforms, they can then focus think tank strategies on training free-market professionals and strategically placing them in institutions across social fields. This process, that I term cross-field sinergy, is illustrated by Chilean neoliberals, who used their unity within the Pinochet regime to create a durable cross-field coalition after the democratic transition, insulating free-market policies from popular pressures in the long-term. Conversely, if neoliberal think tank professionals remain fragmented, they must prioritize fostering more effective policymaking. In doing so, they become “pulled” into state institutions, paradoxically weakening their ability to form a robust coalition. As seen in Argentina, this process weakens free-market think tanks and triggers the rise of a strong oppositional coalition that dismantles their legacy. I term this process field absorption.
This comparison underscores the importance of understanding how civil society organizations can actively develop different types of expertise and strategies to contribute to neoliberal resilience across a wide variety of political regimes and field configurations, and why they sometimes fail to do so. I finally discuss the generalizability of this framework to cases of conservative think tank advocacy in the cases of Donald Trump (U.S.), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), and Viktor Orbán (Hungary), showcasing the malleability of non-profits in different cultural and institutional contexts.
