Why Too Much Transparency is a Bad Thing: The WarshReview on Transparency in the BoE’s Monetary PolicyCommittee

Following the review of the Monetary Policy Committee’s (MPC) transparency practices and procedures, the Bank of England today published a report by former Federal Reserve Board Governor Kevin Warsh. Warsh makes five broad recommendations for creating a balance between the demand for greater transparency and the intrinsic defence of genuine deliberation as the foundation for sound policymaking. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey finds the report is a novel approach to the conundrum that transparency poses to good public policy in the face of uncertainty

Congress has a very limited ability to hold central bankers to account

The financial crisis has brought new prominence to the role of central banks and bankers on both sides of the Atlantic. But who holds these powerful figures to account? In the U.S., Congress has this responsibility, but new research by Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey finds that it has been largely unable to significantly challenge the Fed since the 1970s. She argues that congressional oversight is constrained by members’ electoral incentives, a lack of expertise in monetary policy, the extreme transparency of hearings, and the sheer size of the House and Senate banking committees

Smile or smirk? Why nonverbal behaviour matters in parliamentary hearings

When witnesses appear before select committees, Hansard records their words, but not their expressions. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey analysed nonverbal behaviour in 12 economic policy committee hearings. She argues that gestures, expressions and tone may be pivotal in whether a policymaker’s arguments are accepted

19th Century British Data

Data derived from Contents of Parliamentary Debates on Trade Policy and Corn Laws between 1813 and 1846 - please note that this archive is a compressed ZIP file, and must be unzipped before use. Roll Call Data for 1841-47 Parliament (requires SPSS). Also includes supplementary guide to navigating the Parliamentary Debates ZIP file. Dataset used in: Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl (2003) Ideology, party and interests in the British Parliament of 1841–47. British journal of political science, 33 (4). pp. 581-605. ISSN 0007-1234 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/863/ and Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl (2006) From the Corn Laws to free trade: interests, ideas and institutions in historical perspective. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. ISBN 9780262195430 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/12320

Nonverbal contention and contempt in U.K. parliamentary oversight hearings on fiscal and monetary policy

In parliamentary committee oversight hearings on fiscal policy, monetary policy and financial stability, where verbal deliberation is the focus, nonverbal communication may be pivotal in the acceptance or rejection of arguments proffered by policymakers. Systematic qualitative coding of these hearings in the 2010-15 UK Parliament finds that: (1) facial expressions, particularly in the form of anger and contempt, are more prevalent in fiscal policy hearings, where backbench parliamentarians hold frontbench parliamentarians to account, than in monetary policy or financial stability hearings, where the witnesses being held to account are unelected policy experts; (2) comparing committees across chambers, hearings in the Lords’ committee yield more reassuring facial expressions relative to hearings in the Commons’ committee, suggesting a more relaxed and less adversarial context in the former; and (3) central bank witnesses appearing before both the Commons’ and Lords’ committee tend towards expressions of appeasement, suggesting a willingness to defer to Parliament

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

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

Themes and topics in parliamentary oversight hearings: a new direction in textual data analysis

This paper contributes to the growing empirical work on deliberation in legislatures by proposing a novel approach to analysing parliamentary hearings using both thematic and topic modelling textual analysis software. We explore variations in deliberative quality across economic policy type (fiscal policy, monetary policy and financial stability) and across parliamentary chambers (Commons and Lords) in UK select committee oversight hearings during the 2010–2015 Parliament. Our overall focus is not only to suggest a multi-method approach to the textual analysis of parliamentary data, but also to explore more substantive aspects of parliamentary oversight, such as: (1) the extent to which oversight varies between unelected and elected policy makers; and (2) whether parliamentarians conduct oversight more forcefully or more along partisan lines when they are challenging fellow politicians as opposed to central bank officials. Our findings suggest consistent differences in deliberative styles between types of hearings (fiscal, monetary, financial stability) and between chambers (Commons, Lords)