A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmental organizations, but some are semi-autonomous agencies within government, and some are associated with particular political parties, businesses or the military. Think tanks are often funded by individual donations, with many also accepting government grants.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization in the United States founded in 1983 to advance democracy worldwide, by promoting political and economic institutions, such as political groups, trade unions, free markets, and business groups.
The International Republican Institute (IRI) is an American nonprofit organization founded in 1983 and funded and supported by the United States federal government. Most of its board is drawn from the Republican Party. Its public mission is to advance freedom and democracy worldwide by helping political parties to become more issue-based and responsive, assisting citizens to participate in government planning, and working to increase the role of marginalized groups in the political process, including women and youth. It has been repeatedly accused of foreign interference and has been implicated in the 2004 Haitian coup d'état. It was initially known as the National Republican Institute for International Affairs.
The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) is an international, non-profit organisation founded in 1987. Based in Arlington, Virginia, United States, the organization assists and supports elections and electoral stakeholders. Since 1987, IFES has worked in 145 countries and has programs in more than 50 countries throughout Asia-Pacific, Africa, Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa, and the Americas.
The National Democratic Institute (NDI), is a non-profit American NGO whose stated mission is to "support and strengthen democratic institutions worldwide through citizen participation, openness and accountability". It is funded primarily by the United States and other Western governments, by major corporations and by nonprofits like the Open Society Foundations.
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. He was president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
Larry Jay Diamond is an American political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. Diamond is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University's main center for research on international issues. At the Institute Diamond served as the director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law from 2009-2016. He was succeeded in that role by Francis Fukuyama and then Kathryn Stoner.
Abbas Malekzadeh Milani is an Iranian-American historian, educator, and author. Milani is a visiting professor of political science, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In Milani's book, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, he has found evidence that Persian modernism dates back to more than 1,000 years ago.
The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism comprises a School of Communication and a School of Journalism at the University of Southern California (USC). Starting July 2017, the school's Dean is Willow Bay, succeeding Ernest J. Wilson III. The graduate program in Communication is consistently ranked first according to the QS World University Rankings.
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.
Andrei Popov is a Moldovan diplomat, journalist and civic activist. He is the current Moldovan Ambassador to Greece and Cyprus.
Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, formerly known as the Ash Institute, was established in 2003 and is part of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.
Carl Gershman served from 1984-2021 as the founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private, congressionally-funded, grant-making institution that supports non-governmental groups working for democracy around the world. During his presidency, NED’s annual congressional appropriation grew from $18.5 million in 1984 to $300 million a year in 2021, when it funded nearly 2,000 projects in 100 countries.
Bassma Kodmani was a Syrian academic who was spokesperson of the Syrian National Council. She was the executive director of the Arab Reform Initiative, a network of independent Arab research and policy institutes working to promote democracy in the Arab world.
Vitali Silitski was a Belarusian political scientist, analyst, the first director of the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies. He got his PhD in political science from the Rutgers University. Silitski is the author of the concepts of preventive authoritarianism and authoritarian international. He was also a civil activist and blogger.
Jose Luis Martin Cosgayon Gascon, also known as Chito Gascon, was a Filipino lawyer, civic organizer, and human rights activist. In 2015, he was appointed by then President Benigno S. Aquino III as the Chair of the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines serving a term from 2015 to 2021.
Sharp power is the use of manipulative diplomatic policies by one country to influence and undermine the political system of a target country.
Patrick Heller is an American sociologist and the director of the development research program at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Elizabeth C. Economy is an American scholar, foreign policy analyst, and expert on China's politics and foreign policy. She is Senior Advisor for China to the Secretary of Commerce in the Biden administration and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Shanthi Kalathil is an American foreign policy analyst, international affairs practitioner, human rights advocate, and former journalist, currently serving as a Washington D.C.-based senior fellow at the University of Southern California (USC)'s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy. She was formerly Deputy Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Democracy and Human Rights at the White House National Security Council during the Biden Administration.
