Recently, I spoke with Charlotte Disley, a PhD researcher at the University of St Andrews who is planning a historical study of the Heritage Foundation. Our conversation began, as these things often do, with methods. How do you study a think tank? What counts as the right disciplinary lens? Where does intellectual history end and organisational analysis begin? And, in the case of a think tank as large, influential and politically entangled as Heritage, when does the object of study stop being simply “a think tank” and become something else altogether?
I am interested in this question because it is the focus of a significant part of my book: Exploring Think Tanks: Diverse Origins, Evolving Futures. In it, I also ask the question: how to approach the study of think tanks?
Charlotte’s project is still taking shape. It was not a discussion of settled findings, but of emerging questions, tensions and hypotheses. The field of think tanks needs more of this kind of work: not only research on sectors, ecosystems and typologies, but careful studies of single organisations over time.
Heritage Foundation is an especially revealing — and contentious — case.
It matters, of course, because of its prominence in American conservative politics. But it also matters because it forces us to confront several deeper questions about think tanks as institutions: how they change, what sustains them, who they serve, and whether the label “think tank” still helps us understand organisations that now look as much like political machines as sites of research and policy argument.
Charlotte is based in a history department, and this shapes her project in important ways. But, as she puts it, she finds herself leaning towards political economy, organisational history and the politics of ideas rather than intellectual history alone. This tension is not incidental. It goes to the heart of the challenge.
Heritage Foundation’s ideas and publications matter, of course. So do the doctrines, traditions and ideological traditions it draws upon. But to study a think tank only through its ideas would risk missing what makes it possible as an institution: its funding model, staffing patterns, leadership, audiences, political alliances, the incentives under which it operates, and the changing context in which it becomes useful.
Evolution or revolution?
For Heritage, one of the central questions is whether it has undergone a genuine transformation, or whether what we are witnessing now – its explicit partisanship, for example – is simply a more explicit version of tendencies that were always there.
This is not a trivial distinction. It changes the story entirely.
One possible narrative is that Heritage began as a conventional conservative think tank: free-market, policy-oriented, ideologically committed, but still recognisably part of a wider world of “university without students” D.C.-based think tanks. On this account, something changed over time. Leadership shifts, donor pressures, the rise of the Tea Party, the reshaping of the Republican coalition, the role of evangelical groups, and, later, Trumpism pulled Heritage away from the policy research community and into a more openly partisan, combative, and movement-oriented role. If that is the story, then the 2010s matter enormously. They become the pivotal decade in which Heritage ceases merely to lean right and becomes integrated into a new political project.
But there is another hypothesis: perhaps Heritage did not become something different so much as reveal more clearly what it had always been.
Some former staff often try to distance themselves from what the organisation has become. This is understandable. Institutions change, and people do not always move with them. But it may also produce a kind of retrospective sanitisation: a story in which the earlier Heritage was serious, policy-minded and respectable, while the later Heritage became ideological, religious and extreme. Charlotte’s research suggests that the picture may be more complicated. Even some peer institutions on the free-market right, she said, regard Heritage as more socially conservative and more religious than it sometimes likes to present itself.
That points towards an important research hypothesis: that Heritage’s current form is not a rupture but an intensification. The shift may be real, but it may have taken place on foundations laid much earlier.
If so, then the task is not just to identify when the organisation changed, but to explain why certain elements became dominant, and others fell away.
This is where funding enters the story.
Charlotte has identified a particularly interesting reading of Heritage’s donor model. Unlike many think tanks that rely heavily on a small number of large institutional funders, Heritage appears to have long cultivated a broad individual donor base alongside major wealthy backers. Its website states that 76% of its funding comes from around 500,000 individuals!
Of course, these individuals include USD50 subscribers, “church groups” in Texas and individual billionaires.
But it suggests that donor influence may not operate only through a handful of billionaires or foundations steering an organisation from above. It may also operate through organised communities of supporters whose expectations, values and demands gradually reshape an institution’s agenda.
This leads to another compelling hypothesis: that a think tank funded by a large base of ideologically motivated small- and mid-level donors may be especially open to gradual radicalisation, particularly when those donors are embedded in social, cultural, and religious networks that seek more than technocratic policy reform. If the organisation depends on maintaining enthusiasm, identity and loyalty, then sharper cultural and moral positions may become institutionally advantageous.
In other words, the funding model does not merely sustain the organisation. It may help explain its ideological and strategic evolution.
That does not mean donor pressure works in a crude or mechanical way. Think tanks are not vending machines into which money is inserted and opinions dispensed. But it does mean that questions of intellectual autonomy need to be treated carefully.
During our conversation, we touched on an old distinction: independence versus intellectual autonomy. Very few think tanks are fully independent in any meaningful sense. Their funding, governance and positioning always bind them to some set of interests and constraints. But intellectual autonomy is different. A researcher in a partisan or state-linked institution may still retain space for judgment, argument and disagreement.
People choose to work at an ideologically identifiable think tank. They know what they are getting into.
Today, it may be easy to assume that those who join the organisation already agree with its worldview. There may be little overt coercion because ideological alignment is built into the recruitment process. But Charlotte’s emerging account suggests that staff expectations have changed over the years. Some stayed as the organisation changed around them. Some adapted. Some left. Some perhaps only realised the scale of the shift when it was already well underway.
I think this is not a unique story, though. Organisations often change faster than the people who work for them.
But Heritage’s account raises a fascinating hypothesis for organisational historians of think tanks: that intellectual autonomy can erode not through sudden imposition but through gradual institutional drift. The boiling water is not always noticed immediately. By the time staff perceive the new terms of membership, they may already be professionally, socially and materially tied to the institution.
Riding the wave
A related question concerns how we periodise Heritage’s history.
Charlotte is considering a study running from the organisation’s founding in 1973 to around 2017. That is a long sweep for a PhD, but it makes sense. It allows her to capture the founding moment, the Reagan years, the post-Cold War period, the Tea Party era, and the crucial early 2010s transition. Ending in 2017 also prevents Project 2025 from swallowing the whole story.
This feels wise.
The Heritage Foundation is part of a new wave of think tanks founded from within politics. Earlier think tanks had been established by foundations, researchers, or even former technocrats. Heritage and other think tanks established in the 1970s were founded by party-political insiders with a very clear party-political mission.
Project 2025 did not just happen.
It may be the most visible current expression of Heritage’s political role, but it is not the whole story. Nor is it the first “Mandate for Leadership”. Heritage has been testing and learning for years.
A narrow focus on present-day risks flattens the organisation’s history into a morality play about Trumpism. A longer historical frame allows a more difficult and more interesting question to emerge: under what conditions does a think tank become the preferred vehicle for a broader political project?
That question matters beyond the United States.
Charlotte is also interested in Heritage’s ties to Europe, especially the UK and Nordic countries. This is fertile ground there for replication and scalability. We know that ideas, personnel, tactics and donor networks travel – even if the categories we use to describe politics do not travel neatly. “Right” no longer means what it meant in the 1980s or 1990s, if it ever did. Free markets, globalisation, low taxes and limited government no longer sit comfortably together with the newer politics of tariffs, anti-migration, cultural grievance and moral traditionalism. Yet these coalitions are clearly being assembled, and institutions such as Heritage appear to play an important role in that assembly.
Here, too, Charlotte’s project could make a real contribution. It may help explain how a think tank becomes a bridge between older conservative elites, donor communities, religious activism, and a newer nationalist right. Not because it single-handedly creates those movements, but because it offers them a vehicle: a respectable address, a policy infrastructure, a fundraising machine, an archive, a publishing platform, a recruitment pool and, crucially, a brand.
Usefulness, rather than influence
Think tanks love the language of influence. Donors like it too. But “influence” often tells the story from the think tank’s point of view. It casts the organisation as the protagonist. Heritage changed America. Heritage shaped conservatism. Heritage moved policy. This is often how think tanks narrate their own histories.
But usefulness is different. It shifts agency back to the other critical political actors.
A think tank may survive and thrive not because it heroically influences politics, but because political actors, funders, movements, journalists and parties find it useful. Useful as a source of arguments. Useful as a staffing pipeline. Useful as an advocacy platform. Useful as a respectable public face for ideas that might otherwise seem too nakedly partisan. Useful as a mechanism for translating money into organised policy and political action.
Seen this way, the question is not simply what Heritage did, but why so many actors found Heritage to be a good vehicle for what they wanted done.
A critical history of Heritage should not reproduce the organisation’s own self-image as the prime mover of conservative politics. It should ask why this institutional form proved so attractive, so adaptable and, for so long, so effective.
Looking ahead — too close to the sun?
If Heritage has become so closely associated with one faction, one style of politics, and one particularly aggressive form of ideological mobilisation, what happens when the context changes? Has its success narrowed its future? Has the organisation become so identified with one political moment that it may eventually struggle to outlive it?
That is not a question for a doctoral thesis ending in 2017. But it hovers in the background and should be a key concern for any think tank flying close to the sun.