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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.