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Quantitative differences in think tank dissemination activities in Germany, Denmark and the UK

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Abstract

In recent years, the study of policy advisory systems has been advanced conceptually and analytically through studies of externalisation and politicisation. Still, the understanding of institutional variation in how organisations supply policy advice remains limited. The contribution adds to recent research on think and the study of policy advice by arguing for a focus on the dissemination of policy advice by asking how the dissemination activities of think tanks vary across different policy advisory systems and what this implies for the study of policy advice. This question is explored in a quantitative design which compares publications, events and newspaper mentionings of samples of think tanks from a coordinated (Germany), liberal (UK) and mixed (Denmark) system in 2012. The analysis indicates that think tanks in the UK have the highest level of dissemination on all three activities when controlled for the number of full-time staff. The study indicates that factors beyond the policy process such as developments of funding and media environments should be analysed further as they are likely to be important for how and where think tank disseminate their policy advice.

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Correspondence to Jesper Dahl Kelstrup.

Appendix: Measuring newspaper impact: search engines and representativity

Appendix: Measuring newspaper impact: search engines and representativity

Think tank media impact was searched in the media database LexisNexis which has 2169 newspaper sources available in ‘Nexis’ as of August 2013. Citations were searched in all languages. Unfortunately Nexis has an Anglophone bias in its sources. The database thus includes 648 newspapers in the UK, 71 in the Benelux countries, 69 in Germany, 40 in France and only 1 in Denmark. Furthermore, not all important newspapers are included. While it was impossible to eliminate the bias in newspaper sources, the very weak representation of Danish newspaper sources was corrected by using the Danish search engine Informedia to access the newspaper impact of Danish think tanks in the following 9 daily Danish Newspapers: Berlingske, BT, Børsen, Ekstra Bladet, Information, Jyllands-Posten, Kristeligt Dagblad, Politiken, Weekendavisen. All searches of media impact were performed from January 1st to December 31st in the year 2012. Think tanks were searched by keywords were searched in the whole text. Citations were filtered for close similarity with other sources to avoid duplications. Magazines, journals, newswires, press releases, newsletters blogs and web-based publications were discarded as sources because they challenge the temporal comparison of impact by over-representing the development in citations. Despite the increased importance and think tank focus on new and web-based media these sources were considered too unreliable to be used for any temporal assessment of media impact.

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Kelstrup, J.D. Quantitative differences in think tank dissemination activities in Germany, Denmark and the UK. Policy Sci 50, 125–137 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-016-9254-0

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