Heritage Foundation pioneered the activist advocacy think tank model

Evidence

In 1973, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, two young staffers working for a Republican congressman in Washington, D.C., decided to establish a new and different kind of think tank in the nation’s capital. Feulner and Weyrich envisioned an activist organization with an independent research operation that would be dedicated to influencing policy debates in a way that the venerable and well-established American Enterprise Institute did not. Within a few years, thanks largely to seed money provided by the Coors Foundation, the Heritage Foundation emerged as the first and arguably most effective of a new breed of “advocacy think tanks.” — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1803

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing knowledge of think tank institutional history and to Hayek’s MPS network chapters, which show the intellectual roots feeding into Heritage. — connects to: Heritage’s founder learned IEA’s research-driven advocacy model in London — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1805; Atlas Foundation exported the neoliberal think-tank model worldwide — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1943
• SEED: Angle: how the Heritage model of advocacy think tanks displaced the older scholarly AEI model, and what that shift says about the commoditization of policy knowledge.

Broader Connections

• Heritage’s founder learned IEA’s research-driven advocacy model in London #exemplifies (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1805
• Atlas Foundation exported the neoliberal think-tank model worldwide #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1943