Do societal priorities matter for the agenda of independent central banks?

Independent central banks have come to invest increasingly in engagement with citizens. These interactions are meant to work in two directions, with the organisations informing as well as learning from citizens. Yet, whilst several studies have assessed the impact of central bank communication on citizens, we know little about whether any learning takes place at the side of the organisations. As they are deliberately insulated from political and public preferences, independent central banks are unlikely to follow citizen input in their policy choices. Yet, it is possible – and in fact suggested by the organisations – that some agenda responsiveness takes place; that is, that central banks’ agendas take into account societal issue priorities. Our study assesses this possibility in the case of the Bank of England, one of the most engagement-active central banks. Relying on seeded latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and vector autoregression (VAR) models, we analyse the influence of the topics covered in newspaper articles about the Bank – our proxy for societal issue priorities – on the topics of both the internal policy meetings and external communication of the organisation. Our (preliminary) results show that the attention the Bank dedicates to particular topics can be traced back to societal issue priorities in most of the domains related to the Bank’s mandate. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the politics of central banking – and of non-majoritarian governance more generally.