The ECB and Monetary Politics: Policy Consensus, Accountability and Coalition-Building

This project assesses the political-economic role of the ECB as a pivotal actor in battling the eurozone crisis. It focuses on the intra-institutional deliberations paving the way for major ECB crisis reactions (examining divisions and consensus in the ECB’s governing council) as well as their inter-institutional consequences (highlighting the central bank's efforts at fostering accountability and building coalitions with key stakeholders). Methodologically speaking, the project is grounded in the growing literature on quantitative text analysis. By building and examining a dataset of ECB press conference statements, governing council member speeches, and verbatim transcripts of the ECB's 'monetary dialogue' with the European Parliament's ECON committee, significant co-occurrences and shifts in the ECB's decision-making rationale and communication over the crisis years can be uncovered. Thusly generated findings prove to be relevant on both theoretical and real world grounds, since the ascent of the ECB as a controversial political actor reveals unexplained puzzles for theories of ‘policy consensus’ in EMU as much as it highlights significant challenges for the institutional balance within monetary union.