Abstract
Policy institutes, or “think tanks”, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. Few if any studies have, however, analysed think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, or linked the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and to the transformations of the function(s) of civil society actors in society. This article begins to address this gap by focusing on the evolving field of Swedish think tanks. Our study, based on qualitative interviews with 25 Swedish think tank directors, indicates that these executives perceive the traditional corporatist channels for institutionalized civil society access to policymaking as decreasing in importance. The reduced influence of the classical Swedish popular movements is interpreted by the respondents as having created a space for their own organizations in civil society and in the Swedish policy-making arena.