Generally, thinktankers and their supporters are more comfortable talking about “independent” think tanks than about partisan ones. In fact, partisanship is assumed to be a negative attribute for any think tank.
That is understandable. Independent think tanks fit more neatly into the tidy story we often tell ourselves about evidence, policy, and public debate. They can present themselves as standing above the fray: not quite academic, not quite political, but close enough to both to be useful. They are easier for funders to support, easier for journalists to quote, and easier for international development programmes to champion.
Partisan think tanks are messier.
They sit too close to politics to enjoy the prestige of neutrality, but often too far from the party machine to wield direct power. They are sometimes dismissed as mere propaganda shops, patronage vehicles, or ideological echo chambers. At other times, they are romanticised as the places where parties go to think seriously about the future.
In truth, they can be all of those things, sometimes at the same time.
And yet, if we take representative democracy seriously, we should also take partisan think tanks far more seriously than we do. If political parties remain one of the principal vehicles through which ideas become power, then the organisations that help parties generate ideas, train leaders, shape programmes, engage citizens, and prepare for government deserve far more study, more scrutiny, and, in many cases, more support.
This is one of the key implications of Britt Vande Walle and Sarah L. de Lange’s Understanding the Political Party Think Tank Landscape: A Categorization of Their Functions and Audiences, which argues that political party think tanks are important to parties’ core functions yet remain understudied. It is also consistent with a much older concern of ours at OTT: the tendency to talk about think tanks as if they operate outside politics, when in fact many of them are deeply entangled in it. That point runs through the book I edited with Kristen Sample, Thinking Politics: Think Tanks and Political Parties in Latin America, which explicitly warns that politics is often excluded from the idealised Anglo-American definitions of think tanks, with consequences for how we understand their role.
This matters today for a very practical reason. Political debate in many countries is in a dire state. Party systems are weaker, more volatile, more personalised, and often less programmatic than they once were. Public debate is faster, shallower, and more emotionally charged. Political actors are under relentless pressure to react before they have had a chance to think.
In that context, institutions that can help parties slow down, make sense of evidence, develop coherent positions, and build cadres capable of governing well are not a luxury. They may be part of the democratic infrastructure we need to rebuild.
Juan Fernando Londoño made this point precisely in relation to the way in which think tanks help sustain political parties over time in Colombia, and Vande Walle makes a closely related argument in Transcending Fast-Paced Politics? The Functions of Political Party Think Tanks, where she examines whether and how these organisations help parties sustain longer-term, policy-focused work in the face of short-term political pressures.
Not because they will make politics neutral. They won’t. After all, politics is about conflict, choices, interests, and values.
But because they may help make politics more thoughtful, more coherent, and perhaps even less absurd.
Read more in: When parties need to think
What exactly is a partisan think tank?
At its simplest definition, a partisan think tank is a think tank that has an explicit or implicit relationship with a political party and contributes to that party’s political, ideological, or programmatic development.
That relationship may be formal or informal. The think tank may be fully embedded in the party’s structure, legally separate but clearly affiliated, or part of a broader ideological ecosystem that orbits around a party or party family. In some countries, the preferred vehicle is a “party foundation”; in others, it may be an institute, research centre, training academy, policy forum, or campaign-era platform that gradually institutionalises itself.
The degree of formality is likely to depend on the political context. In Thinking Politics, Martín Tanaka, Sofía Vera Rojas, and Rodrigo Barrenechea found that think tank and political party relationships remained informal and through individuals in Peru due to the perceived and real political risk involved of the organisations; while Londoño and Matías Cociña and Sergio Toro found more formal relationships in Colombia and Chile, both of whom have stronger and more stable party systems and parties.
These relationships co-exist. When I visited Malaysia in 2022, IDEAS Malaysia hosted a think tanks roundtable. Around the table were the leaders of think tanks with formal and informal associations to political parties and political leaders. So much so that someone joked that if everyone brought “their politician”, most of the Malaysian parliament would be represented.
The labels vary, but the underlying logic is similar: these are institutions that help parties think, not just compete.
To read more about partisan think tanks, explore the sources that have informed this article. Read more +
That makes them different from:
- Independent policy think tanks that engage with all parties;
- Issue-based advocacy organisations;
- Research units inside parliamentary caucuses; and
- Campaign war rooms focused only on immediate electoral tactics.
As Vande Walle and de Lange suggest in Understanding the Political Party Think Tank Landscape, it is helpful to think about them in terms of function and audience: what they do, and for whom. That sounds obvious, but it is useful because partisan think tanks are often judged by the standards we apply to independent think tanks. And that is a mistake. Their purpose is not only to influence power from the outside. Often, their purpose is to improve the quality of thought within institutions seeking power.
What do partisan think tanks do?
One of the most practical OTT contributions to this discussion is Leticia M. Ruiz Rodríguez and Mikel Barreda’s Six ways think tanks support political parties. Their piece offers a clear account of what these organisations do and why they matter. Ruiz Rodríguez and Barreda define partisan think tanks as organisations that maintain a relationship — sometimes formalised and explicit — with one or more political parties in pursuit of common goals through the following functions:
- Technical backing: They generate policy ideas, produce analysis, organise evidence, test arguments, and help parties articulate positions that are more coherent than a handful of talking points. In many contexts, this alone is valuable. Too many parties have become electoral machines without much policy capacity behind them.
- Decision support: They can brief party leaders, advise legislators, shape policy proposals, and prepare future ministers and senior advisers for the realities of government. This is where partisan think tanks can become especially important in contexts where parties have weak internal policy structures and rotate rapidly between opposition and office.
- Political socialisation and cadre formation: This may be one of their most important and least appreciated functions. Parties do not only need policies. They need people: people who can think politically, speak publicly, negotiate internally, understand institutions, and carry an ideological tradition forward without reducing it to slogans. A serious partisan think tank can become a school for political leadership.
- Electoral preparation: They may contribute to manifestos, sharpen messages, prepare policy platforms, and help campaigns offer something more substantial than personality or outrage.
- Career pipelines and elite formation spaces: This is often described in negative terms as the revolving door between think tanks, parties, and government. Sometimes that criticism is warranted. But it is also true that politics needs routes through which expertise and political experience can interact. Democracies do not benefit when governing elites are selected only for loyalty or visibility.
- Public legitimation: In contexts where parties are distrusted, fragmented, or intellectually hollowed out, a think tank can help a party present itself as more serious, more prepared, and more capable of governing. This should not be confused with branding alone. At their best, partisan think tanks can help parties make the case for policies in ways that citizens, journalists, and potential allies can actually engage with.
- To this list I would add a seventh function: public pedagogy. Older OTT reflections on “internal” or partisan think tanks, such as Claudio Jones’s What do partisan think tanks seek?, suggest that many of these organisations are not only trying to inform parties. They are also trying to educate wider publics, translate ideological commitments into practical arguments, and make politics more intelligible. Jones explicitly argues for a broader, more active role for partisan think tanks—one that includes leadership formation, programme development, and the dissemination of political ideas. In weaker democracies, or in polarised democracies, that role can be surprisingly important.
Long-time On Think Tank followers will recognise that these of these functions are also functions of non-partisan think tanks.
Politics cannot function on technical evidence alone. But neither can it function on vibes.
A useful typology
Britt Vande Walle and Sarah L. de Lange offer a particularly helpful way of categorising political party think tanks. Rather than assuming they are all modelled the same way, they distinguish them by their dominant functions and target audiences. That produces four broad types:
- Party assistants: These are closely tied to the party’s internal life. Their work is practical, immediate, and often organisational. They support leaders, help develop positions, brief internal actors, and keep the machinery of political thinking running.
- Party supporters: These remain party-aligned but do more substantive policy work. They contribute research, programme development, policy design, and issue expertise. They help the party develop content, not just internal coordination.
- Party promoters: These are more outward-facing. They seek to shape public debate, communicate ideological frames, influence media narratives, and build broader support for the party’s ideas beyond the party itself.
- Party intellectuals: These are perhaps the most interesting. They are the institutions that keep a longer horizon in view. They develop doctrine, revisit first principles, explore new ideas, and often do the intellectual work parties neglect when consumed by the next election.
This is a genuinely useful framework because it allows us to stop asking the unhelpful question—is this a real think tank or just a party vehicle?—and start asking better ones:
- What role is it playing?
- For whom?
- At what distance from the party?
- Over what time horizon?
That, in turn, allows for a second, more political typology that may be especially useful across regions.
- Some partisan think tanks are embedded: effectively part of the party, even if legally distinct.
- Some are affiliated: they maintain their own identity but remain clearly tied to a party or political family.
- Some are ecosystemic: they are part of a broader ideological field that includes party actors, intellectuals, donors, media platforms, and social organisations.
- And some are transitional: they emerge around a leader, campaign, or moment of party-building, then fade, fragment, or institutionalise over time.
This matters because partisan think tanks are not static. Their role changes as parties gain power, lose power, split, professionalise, or drift.
That point comes through especially clearly in Leandro Echt’s work on Argentina. In Partisan think tanks: between knowledge and politics. The case of Pensar Foundation and PRO party in Argentina, Echt shows how the relationship between a party and its think tank is shaped by the broader political context, the functions the organisation performs, the degree of strategic autonomy it retains, and whether it can survive organisationally over time.
That last point is particularly important. Many partisan think tanks are born in moments of political need. Far fewer become durable institutions.
Why partisan think tanks are different
The more one looks at partisan think tanks, the harder it becomes to judge them by the usual metrics applied to think tanks.
An independent policy institute may be judged by whether it influences legislation, contributes to public debate, improves policy design, or informs government from the outside.
A partisan think tank may do all of that, but much of its real work happens elsewhere.
Its impact may appear in a better manifesto, a more coherent party position, a more competent shadow minister, a stronger generation of party cadres, or a more serious internal debate.
Its impact is in the nuances, not in the visible, in a media citation count or a policy win.
Its value may lie in helping a party become more programmatic and less improvisational.
Its autonomy, meanwhile, is never absolute. Nor should we expect it to be. The question is not whether it is “independent” in the manner of an academic centre. The question is whether it has enough room to think, enough credibility to challenge, and enough proximity to matter.
Too much independence, and the party ignores it.
Too little, and it becomes a glorified comms office – unlikely to attract good cadres.
That tension between autonomy and loyalty is probably the defining characteristic of partisan think tanks.
They need to be close enough to understand the party and shape it, but independent enough to say something the party does not already know.
That is a hard institutional balance to strike. It is also what makes them interesting.
The unique challenges they face
Partisan think tanks face all the usual difficulties of think tanks — funding, talent, relevance, visibility— but they do so in a much more politically exposed environment.
The first challenge is the one just mentioned above: autonomy versus loyalty.
The second challenge is time.
Parties are trapped in fast politics. They are shaped by electoral calendars, media cycles, leadership struggles, scandals, coalition arithmetic, and the constant pressure to respond. Think tanks, by contrast, are supposed to think more slowly. Britt Vande Walle’s Transcending Fast-Paced Politics? The Functions of Political Party Think Tanks captures this tension. Her analysis of political party think tanks in the Netherlands and Flanders finds that direct public funding and greater autonomy are associated with a stronger capacity to support long-term thinking.
That may be one of the most important democratic functions partisan think tanks can perform.
The third challenge is the line between research and propaganda.
All partisan institutions communicate ideas in ways designed to persuade. That is normal. The problem begins when persuasion displaces inquiry altogether. The best partisan think tanks do not pretend to be neutral, but they do attempt to be serious. They should not hide their political commitments. They should, however, still care whether what they say is well-grounded, coherent, and intellectually defensible.
The fourth challenge is financial opacity and patronage.
This is not a minor issue. The political proximity that makes partisan think tanks potentially influential also makes them vulnerable to opaque funding arrangements, factional capture, or the use of “ideas” as a cover for financing and influence networks. OTT’s work on Spain, including Alina Orrico, Jessica Correa, Julie LaFrance and Shannon Sutton’s Think tank landscape scan 2022: Spain and the OTT series Think tanks and transparency: the new expectation, reminds us that political foundations compete with independent think tanks in Spain’s ecosystem and that transparency is treated as an important principle of good practice.
A fifth challenge is institutional fragility in weak party systems.
This is especially relevant in Latin America, but by no means limited to it. In systems where parties are personalist, volatile, weakly institutionalised, or frequently reassembled around leaders and electoral moments, partisan think tanks may struggle to become durable. They can become campaign platforms rather than institutions; training centres for one political cycle rather than lasting spaces for policy and political learning.
And yet, it is precisely in such contexts that they may be most needed.
Why they may matter more now than before
There is a temptation, when political systems deteriorate, to turn away from parties.
Who can blame us? In many countries, parties are distrusted, hollow, transactional, leader-centric, and poor at generating coherent ideas. In my own country, Peru, parties have become vehicles for criminal organisations – or criminal organisations in their own right. Public debate is often reduced to tribal signalling. Legislative politics becomes short-term bargaining. Evidence enters political life late, selectively, and often instrumentally—if at all.
The instinctive response is to invest elsewhere: in civil society, in independent media, in citizen initiatives, in expert networks, in non-partisan think tanks.
All of that matters.
But there is a risk here. If we abandon parties in search of simpler and cleaner solutions, we end up hoping that better politics will somehow emerge around them or despite them.
That seems unlikely.
Parties, however flawed, remain central to democratic representation. They select leaders, organise legislatures, form governments, aggregate interests, and give shape to public choices. If parties are weak, public debate suffers. If parties are volatile, policy becomes volatile. If parties stop thinking, the entire political system becomes more reactive, more performative, and more vulnerable to demagoguery.
This is where partisan think tanks come in.
A good partisan think tank can help a party:
- Become less impulsive and more reflective;
- Move internal debate away from personalities and towards programmes;
- Test ideas before they become slogans;
- Produce shared language that links values to evidence;
- Create spaces where future leaders learn to argue, not just mobilise;
- Anchor their positions in something more durable than the emotional weather of the day, and crucially;
- Identify areas of common ground in the evidence, even where values remain in disagreement.
That last point matters enormously in polarised contexts. Partisan think tanks will not eliminate political conflict, nor should they be expected to. Healthy democracy depends on real disagreement. But better partisan institutions may improve the quality of that disagreement. They may make it more substantive, more legible, and less chaotic. They may help opposing camps argue about trade-offs, priorities, and evidence rather than merely about identities and enemies.
In that sense, investing in partisan think tanks is not necessarily about “helping one side”. It may be about strengthening the quality of political competition itself.
That is not always the result. But it is a possibility worth taking seriously.
Why we need to study them much more
One of the most persuasive aspects of Vande Walle and de Lange’s Cambridge article is its insistence that political party think tanks are important yet understudied. That should ring true to anyone working on think tanks, political parties, or evidence use.
We have spent years studying how think tanks influence policy from the outside. We know far less about the institutions that shape how parties think before they enter government, while they are in opposition, or as they prepare to govern.
That is a major blind spot.
Studying partisan think tanks can help us understand:
- Why some parties are more programmatic than others;
- Where policy capacity sits within party systems;
- How parties develop and renew ideological traditions;
- How political elites are trained and socialised;
- How evidence travels into politics before it becomes policy;
- Why some parties govern more coherently than others;
- How democratic systems generate, or fail to generate, reflective capacity.
It may also tell us something broader about the state of politics itself.
Where partisan think tanks are absent, weak, or purely performative, we may be looking at a party system with very little capacity for long-term thinking. Where they are robust, credible, and connected, we may find more substantive internal debate and more policy continuity.
Not always. But enough to make the question worth serious comparative research.
Why invest in them—and how to do so wisely
This is where some readers may become uncomfortable.
Why invest in partisan think tanks at all?
Because if democracy is in trouble, the answer cannot only be to support institutions that stand outside party politics. We also need to improve the institutions that make party politics more thoughtful, more coherent, and better able to govern well.
That does not mean writing blank cheques to party-affiliated organisations.
It means recognising that political systems need knowledge infrastructures, not only electoral machinery. We need to go back to Adolfo Garcé’s work on political knowledge regimes.
A serious argument for investing in partisan think tanks begins with a simple observation: poor political systems produce poor policy, no matter how many excellent independent think tanks surround them. If parties cannot absorb ideas, train people, or develop programmes, evidence remains external, intermittent, and easy to ignore.
Investing in partisan think tanks, then, can be justified on several grounds.
- First, it can help reduce volatility: Parties that think more institutionally may govern less erratically. They may be less prone to wild swings, incoherent promises, or policy improvisation.
- Second, it can help improve the quality of political debate: When parties have stronger intellectual and programmatic capacity, debate can shift—at least somewhat—from personalities and outrage towards proposals, evidence, and trade-offs.
- Third, it can help strengthen democratic competition: Better-resourced partisan think tanks may enable parties to compete on the basis of ideas, not just on patronage, media control, or charismatic leadership.
- Fourth, it can help create common reference points: Even adversarial political actors may be able to argue on the basis of shared evidence, common institutional knowledge, or a mutually intelligible policy vocabulary.
- Fifth, it can help rebuild the parties themselves: In many countries, party organisations are simply not what they used to be. If they are to recover some programmatic life, they need institutions around them that can think, train, archive, convene, and reflect.
This does not mean any support model will do.
If funders, democracy support organisations, or even domestic reformers want to invest in partisan think tanks, they should do so with great care. Here are some recommendations:
- Support capacity, not just messaging: That means investing in policy development, research methods, archives, leadership training, convening, governance, and organisational infrastructure.
- Reward transparency: If an organisation is close to politics and receiving support, it should be expected to disclose governance arrangements, funding sources, and institutional purpose.
- Support pluralism, not just allies: The goal should be a healthier political system, not merely a stronger version of one’s preferred political camp. In some contexts, that may mean supporting a range of organisations across ideological traditions.
- Invest in quality and method: Partisan think tanks need not be neutral, but they do need to be competent. Better research standards, clearer communications, stronger governance, and more serious internal debate all matter.
- Encourage cross-party learning: Even strongly partisan organisations can learn from one another about leadership development, research quality, transparency, evidence use, and institutional sustainability.
- Develop better ways of assessing impact: Not every meaningful contribution made by a partisan think tank will show up in a headline or a policy citation. Sometimes the most important effect is quieter: a stronger manifesto, a better prepared legislator, a more capable minister, a more coherent internal debate.
- Encourage engagement with the broader think tank community: Partisan think tanks need their independent cousins. They cannot do it all alone.
Four short profiles
The category “partisan think tank” covers a broad range of organisations. Some are clearly think tanks; others sit at the boundary between a party foundation, an ideological platform, a research centre, and a political school. That is not a flaw in the category. It reflects how politics is organised in practice.
Below are four short profiles that help illustrate the range.
Profile 1: Fundación Pensar (Argentina)
Type: Party supporter/party intellectual
Political family: Historically linked to PRO
As Leandro Echt explains in Partisan think tanks: between knowledge and politics. The case of Pensar Foundation and PRO party in Argentina, Fundación Pensar, became one of the clearest recent examples in Latin America of a partisan think tank helping a political force build policy capacity and governability. Its significance lies not only in what it produced, but in how it functioned as a bridge between expertise and party-building. It illustrates the promise—and fragility—of partisan think tanks in relatively fluid party systems.
Profile 2: FAES (Spain)
Type: Party promoter/party intellectual
Political family: Historically associated with the Spanish centre-right and the Partido Popular orbit
FAES is a useful example of an ideologically driven institution that sits within the broader conservative ecosystem and has historically played an important role in shaping political debate, producing ideas, and advancing a broader intellectual agenda. It is especially relevant to discussions about transparency and the blurred boundaries between party-linked foundations, ideological vehicles, and think tanks, as noted in OTT’s work on Spain’s landscape and transparency debates.
Profile 3: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Germany)
Type: Party supporter/party intellectual
Political family: Social democratic tradition, associated with the SPD
The German political foundations are perhaps the clearest example of how partisan and quasi-partisan policy institutions can become long-lasting, serious, and internationally influential. The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung represents a model in which political education, policy reflection, leadership development, and international engagement are combined within a single institutional framework. It shows what can happen when a party family develops a durable intellectual infrastructure rather than relying only on campaign machinery.
Profile 4: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (Germany)
Type: Party supporter/party intellectual
Political family: Christian democratic tradition, associated with the CDU
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung offers a parallel example on the centre-right. Like the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, it demonstrates that party-linked foundations can play a much broader role than just manifesto preparation: they can serve as institutional carriers of political education, leadership development, ideological continuity, and international exchange. Whether one agrees with their politics or not, they show that democratic systems can benefit when parties invest in serious, long-term thinking institutions.
Profile 5: The Heritage Foundation (United States)
Type: Party promoter/party intellectual
Political family: Closely aligned with the U.S. conservative movement and the Republican policy ecosystem, though not formally the research arm of the Republican Party.
This is an outlier in this list. Using the typology above, Heritage is not primarily a “party assistant” because it is not structurally within the Republican Party, nor is it primarily an internal support unit for party management. Instead, it works more like an outward-facing institution that develops policy frameworks, shapes conservative doctrine, and projects ideas into the broader political arena—exactly the sort of role associated with party promoters and party intellectuals.
It is also a good example of an ecosystemic partisan think tank: formally independent, but deeply embedded in a wider ideological network that includes politicians, activists, donors, media actors, and party-aligned policy entrepreneurs. That makes it influential in party politics without making it a formal party organ.
A few more examples worth exploring
If you want to expand the article or build a follow-up piece, these are also useful cases to consider:
- Fabian Society (UK) – historically linked to the Labour tradition; an example of a longer-horizon ideological and policy forum that influences party debate from a semi-independent position.
- Jean-Jaurès Foundation (France) – associated with the French socialist tradition; a useful case of a party-linked intellectual institution engaging wider public debate.
- Fundación Pablo Iglesias (Spain) – relevant to understanding the socialist tradition in Spain and the broader landscape of party-linked foundations.
- Candidate- or party-linked policy institutes in South Korea and Malaysia – a useful reminder that campaign-era institutes can function as temporary or transitional partisan think tanks.
A call to action: the case for taking them seriously
Finally, an OTT call to action!
There is no need to romanticise partisan think tanks. They can become complacent, doctrinaire, opaque, or merely instrumental. They can mirror the weaknesses of the parties they serve. Some will never be more than branding exercises with a few policy papers attached.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss the category because some cases are poor.
The real question is not whether partisan think tanks are pure. They are not.
The real question is whether democratic politics can function well without institutions that help parties think more seriously, train people more carefully, and develop ideas more coherently.
In many places, the answer increasingly looks like no.
We often say we want better politics: less polarised, less reactive, less personality-driven, less detached from evidence, more capable of solving public problems. But that outcome will not emerge simply because more good research exists somewhere outside the party system. At some point, politics needs institutions capable of receiving, processing, contesting, adapting, and using ideas from within.
Partisan think tanks can be part of that:
- They can help parties move from improvisation to preparation.
- They can help translate evidence into politically legible choices.
- They can create a shared language where values and facts can still speak to each other.
- They can train political actors who know how to argue rather than merely provoke.
- And, in healthier cases, they can help make democratic disagreement more substantive and less chaotic.
That is no small thing.
If we care about the quality of political systems — not only the quality of standalone policy analysis — then partisan think tanks deserve much more than passing mention. They deserve better research, sharper scrutiny, and, in many contexts, thoughtful investment.
Not because they will save democracy on their own.
But because democracy is unlikely to improve if the institutions closest to political power stop thinking altogether.