Think Tanks and Political Crises in Chile, 2011–2022; or, The Crystallization of the Intellectual Infrastructure in a Middle-Income Country

Why did Chile’s think tank sector become more concentrated even as supply and demand for expert opinion expanded? This article examines nine organizations between 2011 and 2022, tracking 18,948 public interventions and conducting sixty-six interviews with think tank members and stakeholders to understand this apparent paradox. While political crises, from student movements to the 2019 social “outbreak” offered opportunities for new voices to emerge, established think tanks systematically consolidated their advantages. This article develops the concept of intellectual infrastructure—the material, institutional, technological, and network conditions enabling expert interventions—to explain how advantages in funding and media access become self-reinforcing. In a middle-income country where international funding dried up without the emergence of domestic philanthropy, organizations with larger, more flexibly allocated resources could effectively crowd out competitors. This challenges assumptions about expertise democratization, revealing how intellectual authority becomes concentrated even during periods of apparent openness.