Science Foundation backs CBS research

In mid June, Professor John Campbell, Dartmouth College & visiting professor at CBP and Professor Ove K. Pedersen, CBS obtained funding equal to 117.504USD from one of the research funding institutions that set the highest standards in the world: The U.S. National Science Foundation.

Yet unknown research area

Little is known about how the policy ideas that politicians, public bureaucrats, interests groups and others fight over are generated in democratic societies. This project explores this process and answers several related questions: How are the policy research organizations (e.g., think tanks) that generate these ideas organized in different countries? How do they operate and try to influence public policy? How have they changed since the late 1980s? Have they become more or less similar over time? Answers to these questions will be developed through the analysis of in-depth interviews and documents collected from a sample of these organizations in four countries: Denmark, France, Germany, and the United States.

Possibility for unique results and influence

By doing this, the research will also test two important theories of organizational and institutional change that have preoccupied social scientists for years. The first theory suggests that groups of organizations in a field tend to converge over time on a common set of practices; the second theory suggests that they do not and that organizations tend to retain their uniqueness, even as they change. Rarely have these theories been tested with qualitative data. Hence, this project offers a unique opportunity not only to determine the degree to which convergence in an organizational field has occurred, but also to identify the mechanisms that are involved.

As a result, this research will have several broad impacts. Firstly, it will help us to better understand how organizational and institutional change occurs. Secondly, it will help policy research organizations better understand how their operations compare to their counterparts at home and abroad. Finally, it will offer new insights into an important but much neglected part of democratic policy-making—the process by which new policy ideas are generated in the first place.

Please contact Professor Ove K. Pedersen for an elaboration of the Danish perspectives of the project.