How They Do it: The Overton Window

Posted by Joshua Trevino @ 3:08 am, April 29th, 2006

As some may know, I work at a free-market think tank, and as such, qualify as a full-fledged member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. While places like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and others are justly famous for their national-level work, it’s the network of state-level think tanks that are, to my biased mind, the unsung heroes of the movement.

So, with that being said, and mindful of my business-related absence for the latter half of this week, I’m going to share with you a little strategizing exercise from the bowels of the VRWC.

The mission of a think tank is to introduce ideas into public discourse and normalize them within the public discourse. The steps an idea takes to full legitimacy are roughly as follows:

Unthinkable

Radical

Acceptable

Sensible

Popular

Policy

This is a rough continuum. Not all ideas start at the same point, not all make it to the endstate — and some travel backwards. The think tank, with its advocacy and scholarship, does its best to make sure that its preferred ideas reach their endstate. But how does it do this in a systemic way? How does it stay within the bounds of possibility — the acceptable, sensible, and popular — even as it reaches for long-term goals in the radical and unthinkable categories?

One useful tool is the Overton window. Named after the former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy who developed the model, it’s a means of visualizing where to go, and how to assess progress.