Ideological Polarization of Think Tanks in the USA during the Donald Trump’s Presidency

This research examines how 10 leading American think tanks represented Donald Trump in their publications from 2016 to 2018 conjointly with their donors’ sponsorship behavior. The unprecedented figure of Donald Trump has led to vivid political polarization among American society and public policy actors. Thereby, within this work, I tried to shed light on the following dilemma: were initially non-partisan think tanks and their sponsors polarized according to shared ideological perception of Donald Trump? To find the correlation between a think tank’s position towards Donald Trump and sponsors’ decision to support this organization or not, Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) were used. On the one hand, via NPF content analysis of the articles published by think tanks, I managed to pinpoint organizational attitude towards Donald Trump, party preferences, expectations about the future of the USA, and whom/what they treated as victims or rescued. On the other hand, the SNA part was useful during the analysis of sponsors’ behavior, where emphasis was put on indegree and outdegree centrality values. Based on the gained results, I came to the following conclusions: 1. Even though the majority of analyzed think tanks occurred to be non-partisan, more than half of them were biased against Donald Trump (5 think tanks were anti-Trump and only Heritage Foundation was pro-Trump). 2. Anti-Trump think tanks tend to actively use Stories of decline in their research, while pro-Trump think tanks, conversely, tend to rely on Stories of progress. 3. SNA results showed that sponsors’ behavior and preferences had not changed over time. Moreover, due to the research design limitations and found domination of anti-Trump organizations, it is hard to approve or disapprove the correlation between donors’ support and think tanks’ position toward Donald Trump.