What do politicians think of technocratic institutions? Experimental Evidence on the European Central Bank

Abstract

Technocracy has come to be increasingly regarded as a threat to representative democracy. Significant attention has thus been recently devoted to exploring public preferences towards technocratic institutions. Elected policymakers’ attitudes have instead not been investigated as systematically. This paper fills this gap by examining politicians’ views on central banks. Based on an original elite survey of the Members of the European Parliament, we gauge elected policymakers’ attitudes towards the mandate and policy conduct of the European Central Bank. Our findings show that the political orientation of politicians largely drives attitudes towards the ECB’s institutional mandate. Interestingly, the findings from two experiments embedded in the survey also show that the attitudes of MEPs are not as static as ideological orientations would lead us to expect. The information set to which politicians are exposed significantly shapes their views on both the ECB’s mandate and its policy conduct, but less on ECB independence.

Keywords: accountability, central banks, ECB, independence, political attitudes, technocracy, trust

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