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This chapter discusses how the United States experienced a crisis of partisanship that was marked by a continuing escalation in ideological rancor, polarization, and divisiveness in Washington. This entailed the proliferation of a more competitive and often contentious set of private policy research organizations thanks to numerous sources of tax deductible private funding from corporations and wealthy individuals, and a fragmented and porous political system. Paradoxically, as the crisis of partisanship reached an unprecedented level in the late 1990s and early 2000s, cooperation among some of these organizations broke out across the political divide due to the efforts of those who sensed the disastrous consequences of such mean-spirited partisanship for the country and for the credibility of their research organizations.

This chapter shows that the German knowledge regime was coordinated through a number of mechanisms that reflected Germany's long-standing formal corporatist institutions as well as the country's strong multiparty proportional representation system of government. However, contrary to what one might expect given these institutional legacies, there were also a considerable number of more informal coordinating mechanisms. Following the end of the Golden Age, Germany faced a crisis of corporatism, which led eventually to an expansion of private policy research organizations, not to mention lobbyists, which increased competition in the knowledge regime. This was a decentralized effort to reform the knowledge regime through a kind of trial-and-error process based upon various privately organized initiatives, but it was blended with somewhat more centralized coordination too, such as deliberate efforts by the state to improve the scientific quality of policy analysis and advice emanating from the semi-public policy research organizations.

This chapter demonstrates that in every country, policy research organizations began to converge on similar dissemination practices, such as use of the Internet and new media, by which they channeled their analysis and recommendations to policymakers and others—practices that tended to resemble those of American advocacy organizations. Both trends were evident within and across knowledge regimes. However, convergence was extremely uneven and partial because there were significant obstacles to the wholesale diffusion of these practices across countries and organizations. As a result, although each knowledge regime underwent significant change, national differences persisted in how each one was organized and operated. In short, the chapter found patterns of only limited convergence that were at odds with what many organizational and economic sociologists and others would have expected, especially during times of great uncertainty like the end of the Golden Age and the rise of globalization.

This chapter examines the political-economic problems that France faced in the aftermath of the Golden Age. These political-economic problems persisted and precipitated what some people described as a crisis of ideas within the state—the realization that the statist knowledge regime was too insulated and therefore suffered a lack of fresh thinking. In turn, policymakers began to encourage the development of new semi-public policy research organizations outside the state as well as new ones inside it in an effort to cultivate new ideas. This externalization strategy was very much a part of France's move away from dirigisme—central state-led economic development—and involved the gradual if partial separation of the knowledge regime from the policymaking regime, which earlier had been virtually indistinguishable from each other.

This chapter assesses the degree to which knowledge regimes influence policymaking. It begins by asking whether individual policy research organizations influence policymakers' thinking? For methodological reasons, it is enormously difficult to determine which policy research organizations are influential on an individual basis. Notably, the evidence offered by people in these organizations by which they try to measure their organization's influence is, by their own admission, often circumstantial at best. Meanwhile, based on content analysis of reports from national councils of economic advisors in the four countries studied here, arguments, analyses, and policy recommendations from these councils reflect the arrangement of the knowledge regimes in which they are located. As such, these cases demonstrate that the structure of knowledge regimes affects the content of the ideas that they produce.