The Interlock Structure of the Policy-planning Network and the Right Turn in U.s. State Policy

This paper examines interlocks among the governing boards of 12 leading policyplanning organizations and changes in the structure of this network between 1973 and 2000. Methods of multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering are used to construct topographical maps of the pattern of interlocks among policy-planning groups and their change over time. In contrast to the findings on corporate interlocking directorates, the study shows that board interlocks among policy-planning organizations are substantively meaningful and relatively stable at the dyadic level, although several changes in the topology of the network are also found. In all three decades, big-business “moderate-conservatives” like the Business Council and the Business Roundtable occupied the most central locations in the network. In the 1970s these organizations were linked with the “corporate liberals” to form the core cluster of the policy network. In the 1980s and 1990s the corporate liberals became relatively isolated from the core and their places were taken by several conservative groups. There was also a sharp rise in the cohesion of the network in the late 1970s and 1980s — a period that is widely seen as one of conservative political mobilization and heightened political unity among business elites. These changes in the structure of the policy network are consistent with and help to account for the rightward shift in U.S. state policy during this period. There is an extensive literature on interlocking directorates that uses sophisticated methods of network analysis to map the structure of board interlocks among organizations and assess the implications of those interlocks for organizational behavior (Mizruchi, 1996). However, almost all of this literature — and, therefore, most of what we know about the nature and significance of interlocking directorates — is based on studies of a single type of organization: the large corporation. Like corporations, other kinds of organizations — colleges and universities, charities, civic organizations, foundations, think tanks, trade associations, political lobbies, and interest groups — also have governance structures in which professional administrators are overseen by boards of directors or boards of trustees that include members who are affiliated with outside organizations. As in the case of corporations, this governance structure creates the possibility of direct and indirect interlocks among organizations within a given domain. Unlike corporate board interlocks, however, these non-corporate networks, and their implications for organizational behavior, have received relatively little study. This paper seeks to advance our knowledge of one type of non-corporate interlocking directorate by presenting a network analysis of the governing boards of 12 leading policy-planning organizations and changes in the structure of this interlock network between 1973 and 2000. Privately financed and directed policy-planning organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the