ABSTRACT
Josef Braml, himself a think tank insider with the prestigious German Council on Foreign Relations, compares the German think tank landscape to that in the United States. He demonstrates that Germany's statist tradition has shaped the development of think tanks in that country, such that they are much more tightly associated with the state than is the case in the United States. Braml's suggestion that some convergence toward the American pluralist model of think tank activity and influence may be occurring in Germany focuses our attention of the factors that can lead to a shift from one model to another. Of course, he is not suggesting that what has been, historically, a mainly statist model in Germany is in the process of transforming itself into the American pluralist model. German reunification marked another point of inflection, where the growth pattern of advocacy think tanks became, once again, significantly stronger.
