Mackinac Center for Public Policy
American non-profit free market think tank
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy () is a think tank headquartered in Midland, Michigan. It has been variously described as free market, conservative, and fiscally conservative. Through research and programs, the Mackinac Center supports lower taxes, reduced regulatory authority for state agencies, right-to-work laws, school choice, and property rights.
Joseph Overton (1960–2003), a senior vice president of the Mackinac Center, stated the political strategy that later became known as the Overton window. Overton said that politically unpopular, unacceptable policies must be changed into politically acceptable policies before they can be enacted into law.
The Mackinac Center is said to be the largest state-based conservative think tank. It was ranked among the top 5 percent of think tanks in the United States by the 2018 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report. The Center sponsors MichiganVotes.org, an online legislative voting record database which provides a non-partisan summary of every bill and vote in the Michigan legislature.
History
The organization was founded in 1987. In a 2011 interview, founder Joe Olson said that the Center was first conceived in a Lansing, Michigan bar at a meeting between Olson, fellow insurance company executive Tom Hoeg, Richard McLellan and then-Michigan Senate Republican majority leader John Engler, who would later become governor.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mackinac Center for Public Policy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.