Modeling Policy Advisors Impact on US Policy towards “Arab Spring”: Explanatory Power of Actor-centered and Policy Advisory Systems Approaches

Policy advice has always represented an indispensible element of policy decision-making. Among the various sources of policy advice think tanks were among the first from the non-governmental sector to rival the public sector of policy advice supplement in the early 1980-s. Scientists and scholars have responded to the trend of ‘think tanks’ rising power’ with significant interest and today we observe the rapid development of the third wave of the think tank studies, where actor-centered and policy advisory system approaches represent one of the most promising theoretical developments. Nevertheless, a lack of in-depth studies, which would trace and evaluate the impact of think tanks on the decision-makers in specific areas, conducted from the background of the two theoretical perspectives, can be observed. Thus, the consistency of the theoretical provisions of the two approaches remains to be questioned. The aim of this paper is to test the explanatory power of the two approaches to model the impact of think tanks on the policy-making. For this purpose it applies, on the one hand, a unique technique of impact evaluation devised by the authors within the actor-centered approach. On the other hand, it tests the explanatory capacities of five PAS models using the actor-centered findings as a benchmark of analysis. The research represents an exhaustive case study of the policies elaborated by the US towards one of the most tremendous events on the international agenda over the recent years – the ‘Arab Spring’. This paper investigates the practical cases of the most outstanding American intellectual producers – Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign relations. Upon the whole, the research contributes dramatically to the understanding the mechanisms of think tank impact on policy change and proposes useful insights on how and why think tanks exercise their impact and how this impact can be conceptualized.