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Yeah, like most other ways to participate in democracy, this could hurt democracy, and it has. Far rightwing, well-funded think tanks such as the white nationalist, racist, anti-democracy Claremont Institute have been doing that for decades (Stewart, 2023).
So we need think tanks from the pro-democracy, peace and justice perspective. Indeed, arguably, that needs to happen more broadly more urgently because once a government becomes autocratic, the range of think tank orientation shifts, as it exists, for instance, in Russia, where think tanks either assume a decidedly pro-Russian government stance or they tend to geopoliticize issues rather than acknowledge domestic problems (Axyonova, 2024).
Think tanks generally do not produce much honestly peer-reviewed material since most have a more serious drive toward publishing white papers and monographs exploring the issues in their mission, and the issues that funders prefer explored. This doesn't invalidate their output, but it tends to set a perspective that should inform anyone studying and citing their research findings.
Most valuable are the innovative ideas created and explained by think tank researchers. For example, the studies funded in total or in part by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) have been and continue to be instrumental in disseminating and proliferating usable knowledge on strategic nonviolent methods of effective political action, institutional policy challenges, and corporate accountability. They have translated select resources--documentary films, webinars, monographs, and more into the languages that can benefit democracy and nonviolent change. Their resource library[1], freely available online, is peerless.
A serious problem about think tanks is that they are frequently funded by wealthy family foundations and those family foundations may tend to be quite right-leaning, politically. The exceptions are wonderful but in the end, the intellectual labor toward peace, democracy, nonviolence, and justice is most frequently done on a pro bono basis or tiny royalty-based supplemental income. Like so many other pro-democracy initiatives, we have to learn to do more and more with less and less until we can achieve almost anything with practically nothing. Freedom is a labor of love.
References
Axyonova, V. (2024). Responding to crises in authoritarian environments: Russian think tanks between policy evaluation and state endorsement. Review of Policy Research, 41(6), 941–960. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1111/ropr.12601
Stewart, K. (2023). The Anti-Democracy Think Tank. New Republic, 254(9), 10–21.
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