State Policy Network (Madison Group) Founded - State-Level Think Tank Coordination

In 1986, the Madison Group was established as an informal confederation of state-level think tanks and their supporters, named after the Madison Hotel in Washington, DC where they first met. This network, which would be formalized as the State Policy Network (SPN) in 1992, represented the extension of Powell Memo infrastructure from federal to state level.

Documents from the University of California-San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents reveal that the State Policy Network’s precursor - the Madison Group - was “launched by the American Legislative Exchange Council and housed in the Chicago-based Heartland Institute.” This demonstrates the coordinated nature of conservative infrastructure building, with ALEC creating a complementary think tank network to support its model legislation efforts.

Thomas A. Roe, a South Carolina businessman and Heritage Foundation trustee, played a central role in establishing the network. After telling President Reagan that each state needed something like the Heritage Foundation, Reagan replied “do something about it,” leading Roe to found the South Carolina Policy Council in 1986. Roe would serve as chairman of SPN’s board of directors from its formal founding in 1992 until his death in 2000.

The Madison Group/State Policy Network created a coordinated infrastructure of state-level think tanks that could generate policy research, provide expert testimony, and offer intellectual legitimacy to corporate interests at the state level. This complemented ALEC’s model legislation operations, with SPN member organizations producing research and advocacy to support ALEC bills in state legislatures.

By establishing think tanks in all fifty states, the network enabled systematic corporate influence over state policy while maintaining the appearance of independent local research institutions. State legislators could cite “local experts” from SPN member organizations without revealing the national coordination and corporate funding behind these supposedly grassroots state policy groups.

The 1986 establishment of the Madison Group demonstrated the maturation of conservative infrastructure from scattered organizations in the early 1970s to a sophisticated, multi-level network coordinating federal policy (Heritage, AEI, Cato), model legislation (ALEC), judicial appointments (Federalist Society), and now state-level policy research (SPN). This represented the full operationalization of the Powell Memo’s vision for comprehensive institutional capture.