Predictors of Non-Domestic Funding for Think Tanks in Post-Communist Countries

Think tanks have proliferated in the last three decades worldwide, including the post-communist countries of Europe and Asia, where they emerged motivated to shape the reforms and with crucial material and technical aid of Western partners. Due to their success some of these countries are no longer recipients of such aid and uncertainty prevails on the future of their think tanks. Some see the think tanks as an element of contemporary democracies that will ultimately take roots in the region, but others instead focus the origins of these think tanks and projects they advance, and interpret their future through these. This paper tests a variety of organizational and country-level predictors of the share of non-domestic sources in think tanks'' funding derived from the debate on data for mid-2000s. Because of the multilevel hypotheses and nested data multilevel modeling is applied, analyzing organizations nested in states. To mediate the effects of non-probabilistic procedure of data-collection, small level-1 and 2 sample sizes (92 and 24), and collinearity in the data MCMC-based estimation is used. On country-level per capita GDP, populations size, and ethnolignuistic fractionalization and on organizational level share of advocacy and of publication on organizations activities and its age are found to be predictors of share of non-domestic funding in organizations. Per capita GDP, population size, and publication are associated with a decrease in share of non-domestic funding, and fractionalization, advocacy, and age with its increase.