13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Steffen Hurka
Discussant/s:
Constantin Schäfer
Meeting Room I

Steffen Hurka, Maximilian Haag, Constantin Kaplaner
How proposal complexity conditions report allocation in the European Parliament

Federico Maria Ferrara, Nicolò Fraccaroli
Emotive Rhetoric, Political Ideology and Central Bank Accountability in the European Parliament

Aleksandra Khokhlova
Issue Responsiveness in the European Parliament: The Causal Effect of Institutional Change on Behaviour of MEPs
Emotive Rhetoric, Political Ideology and Central Bank Accountability in the European Parliament
Federico Maria Ferrara 1, Nicolò Fraccaroli 2
1 London School of Economics and Political Science
2 Brown University

Do elected officials employ emotive rhetoric to hold technocrats accountable? In this article, we hypothesise that political ideology plays an important role in explaining politicians' use of emotive rhetoric when exercising democratic scrutiny over the policies of independent central banks. To test this proposition, we use a novel dataset of the hearings of the President of the European Central Bank (ECB) before the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from 1999 to 2020. We measure of emotive rhetoric with well-established sentiment dictionaries developed in different scientific domains. To measure the ideological stances of MEPs, we rely on expert-based classifications of European and national party positioning in the left-right spectrum and on European integration. The article provides evidence that ideologically extreme, anti-EU politicians are significantly more likely to employ a negative rhetoric when addressing the ECB than moderate, pro-EU MEPs. Our results are robust across different measures of emotive rhetoric and have important implications to understand the changing nature of political pressures on independent central banks.