The accountability gap: deliberation on monetary policy in Britain and America during the financial crisis

Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl ORCID: 0000-0002-7820-6231, Dann, Christopher and Chapman, Jacob (2022) The accountability gap: deliberation on monetary policy in Britain and America during the financial crisis. European Journal of Political Economy, 74. ISSN 0176-2680

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Abstract

We employ multiple methods to gauge empirically the quality of the deliberative process whereby central bankers are held to account for their policy decisions. We use quantitative text analysis on the monetary policy legislative oversight hearing transcripts in the UK and US during the financial crisis. We find that the UK performs significantly better than the US in holding the central bank head to account on monetary policy, namely by engaging in a reciprocal dialogue between the legislative committee and the central banker. We then manually code selected exchanges from these transcripts, according to four criteria of deliberation: partisanship, accountability, narrative and response quality. We find that British MPs invoke almost no partisan rhetoric and target their questions more to relevant aspects of monetary policy; by comparison, their American counterparts seek to appeal more to their constituents and tend to veer away from discussing the details of monetary policy.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/european-jou...
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Government
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions J Political Science > JK Political institutions (United States) J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain
Date Deposited:	15 Mar 2022 18:21
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:54
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/114364

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