How local ideas spread in English: a network analysis of think tanks on Twitter

The Elcano Royal Institute is a think-tank for international and strategic studies that analyses world events and trends from a Spanish, European and global perspective.

The Elcano Royal Institute's Working Papers are longer documents of an academic nature - usually between 12,000 and 15,000 words long, with footnotes and bibliographies - on current international affairs of relevance to Spain or on different aspects of Spain's foreign policy and security.

This paper analyses the networks connecting think-tanks in order to better understand their nature and the way they operate within a social reality. As an exploratory study, it makes use of data collected on Twitter in order to approach the larger phenomenon that is the subject of analysis. It focuses on studying the network of relations involved and on what they tell us about how think-tanks function. Nevertheless, it does not specifically deal with the influence that these institutions exert through Twitter.

Twitter creates networks of people and institutions through which information travels and ideas are easily spread, but the think-tanks’ relationship models in this network diverge from the classic communications standard and modify it for their own ends. Counting how many twitter followers a think-tank has is an insufficient criterion to evaluate its influence since the latter must be assessed on the basis of other variables that relate to the quality of contacts rather than to their number.