Capacity, control, and content: the supply of think tank policy advice in India

Despite growing research on policy advice, little is known about how and why the nature of policy advice varies. We hypothesize that examining policy capacity and control within the policy advisory system (PAS) is useful in this regard. We examine how government capacity, think tank capacity, and think tank autonomy influence the content of policy advice in India. We code policy advice based on content analysis of 60 knowledge products from think tanks in India and estimate policy capacity of government departments and think tanks based on their respective staff strengths and budgets. We find that the nature of policy advice, specifically whether it is long-term or short-term, varies based on think tank capacity as well as government capacity; high capacity think tanks tend to provide more long-term advice to high capacity governments. As the PAS within developing countries have less capacity to generate strategic policy advice, variations can be expected in the kinds of policy advice supplied by the PAS in developing countries vis-à-vis OECD countries. Thus, the PAS literature can be extended to developing countries by studying the dynamics between the content of advice, capacity, and control.