McDaniel, S., Baker, A. and Hindmoor, A. (2024) Performing Central Bank Independence: The Bank of England’s Communicative Financial Stability Strategy. Regulation and Governance, 18 (3). pp. 1000-1017. ISSN 1748-5983
Abstract
Central bank independence (CBI) has been one of the most significant regulatory state developments of the last three decades. Following the 2008 financial crisis, many central bank mandates were extended to include a responsibility for financial stability. Some commentators claim this jeopardizes CBI by drawing central banks into contested political issues that can impact financial stability, in what we term an independence in decline thesis. Through a detailed study of the Bank of England's financial stability communications employing the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) codebook, we subject this independence in decline thesis to scrutiny. We show that since the extension of the Bank's mandate in 2011, Bank officials have discussed a wider range of more contentious policy issues. However, these communications appear to date to have largely reinforced the Bank's reputation for technical competence and political neutrality. In this sense, central bank “communicative agency” can be deployed to protect CBI performatively, while CBI can in turn be studied and understood as an ongoing communicative performance act. We find that repoliticization is a more contingent process than much central banking literature has allowed for, while financial stability communications are a potentially powerful regulatory instrument deserving of more scholarly attention.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors.Regulation & Governance published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | central banks, financial stability, independence in decline, performativity, regulatory communicative agency |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Nov 2023 15:10 |
Last Modified: | 09 Dec 2024 14:55 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/rego.12564 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:205078 |