The battle of ideas on the euro crisis: evidence from ECB inter-meeting speeches

Ferrara, Federico Maria

doi:10.1080/13501763.2019.1670231

Cited by 35 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…The political economy literature has long highlighted the influence of ideas and discourse on policymaking and institutional change (McNamara, 1999;Blyth, 2002;Schmidt, 2002), and their importance in stabilizing dominant social groups (Amable and Palombarini 2009). Ideas and discourse are notoriously difficult to measure, but recent research has made several advancements in this direction and provided increasing evidence of their influence on economic policy (Chwieroth, 2007;Helgadóttir, 2016;Ferrara, 2020). Our study confirms this by showing how political discourse affects the policy preferences of the mass public.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Exports vs. investment: How political discourse shapes popular support for external imbalances

Ferrara

Haas

Peterson

et al. 2021

Socio-Economic Review

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The economic imbalances that characterize the world economy have unequally distributed costs and benefits. That raises the question of how countries could run long-term external surpluses and deficits without significant opposition against the policies that generate them. We show that political discourse helps to secure public support for these policies and the resulting economic outcomes. First, a content analysis of 32 000 newspaper articles finds that the dominant interpretations of current account balances in Australia and Germany concur with very distinct perspectives: external surpluses are seen as evidence of competitiveness in Germany, while external deficits are interpreted as evidence of attractiveness for investments in Australia. Second, survey experiments in both countries suggest that exposure to these diverging interpretations has a causal effect on citizens’ support for their country’s economic strategy. Political discourse, thus, is crucial to provide the societal foundation of national growth strategies.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Exports vs. investment: How political discourse shapes popular support for external imbalances

Ferrara

Haas

Peterson

et al. 2021

Socio-Economic Review

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The ECB also started the practice of appearing before a number of national parliaments (Tesche, 2018), increased the frequency of communication with the European Parliament (Fraccaroli, Giovannini, & Jamet, 2018), engaged with debates on fiscal policy and structural adjustment (Ban & Patenaude, 2018;Diessner & Lisi, 2019); and even toured Europe in order 'to engage, explain and listen' to European public 2 A straightforward explanation for the changes to the ECB traditionally guarded communication strategy lies in the (de facto and de jure) transformations in the ECB role throughout the crisis. As the ECB took on an increased political leadership by adopting unconventional policies and taking on new legal responsibilities in the realm of financial stability, its rhetoric expanded accordingly (Diessner & Lisi, 2019;Ferrara, 2019;Tortola & Pansardi, 2019). Although the changes in the policy context are certainly important to explain the ECB behavior, we argue that the ECB strategically responds to negative public opinion by using an expanded communication as a way to increase its perceived legitimacy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Let's speak more? How the ECB responds to public contestation

Moschella

Pinto

Diodati

2020

Journal of European Public Policy

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Although the post-crisis politicisation of the ECB is widely acknowledged, little empirical evidence exists about how this important non-majoritarian institution has responded to public contestation. This article starts filling this gap by investigating whether and how public opinion affects ECB communication. Based on automated text analysis of the speeches delivered by Executive Board members (2001-2017), the article shows that negative public opinion is associated with an expansion of the scope of ECB communication and a reduction in the salience attributed to monetary policy issues. These results challenge the view according to which the ECB conceives of its sources of legitimation based almost exclusive on the achievement of its mandate. In particular, our findings suggest that increased politicisation leads the ECB to reassess the sources of its legitimation strategy from a strategy based on output achievement towards one based on participation to broader policy debates.

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“…Since the outbreak of the Great Recession, several scholars have explored the existence of significant changes in the discourse on socio-economic issues by the European Commission (Pansardi and Battegazzorre, 2018; Schmidt, 2019), the European Central Bank (Ferrara, 2019) and Member States’ governments (Schmidt, 2014, 2019). More rarely, however, have they concentrated on the specific topic of EU social policy.…”

Section: Analysing Eu Social Policy Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most scholars acknowledge that, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession, EU institutions embraced as a dominant narrative the promotion of fiscal consolidation and labour market deregulation measures (see, for example, Ferrara, 2019; Miró, 2020; Schmidt, 2016). As a result, the prevailing ‘policy image’ (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993) in the social and employment field was one of ‘social austerity’.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaking social Europe: A paradigmatic shift in the European Commission Presidents’ social policy discourse?

Vesan

Pansardi

2021

Journal of European Social Policy

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This article presents an original analysis of the social policy discourse at the European Union level by focusing on the language used by European Commission Presidents when addressing social issues. Through an empirical analysis based on a semi-supervised machine learning approach, we consider the entire corpus of speeches made by Barroso and Juncker from 2010 to 2018 and we classify all sentences according to three possible variants of social policy language: social-retrenchment, social-investment and rights-based language. We argue that the focus on these languages allows us to understand whether the ‘fiscal consolidation discipline’ narrative, which dominated in the aftermath of the Great Recession, has been challenged over the years by the recourse to alternative ‘social policy images’. The results confirm a significant shift in the overall configuration of social policy discourse between Barroso and Juncker. This shift has been mainly characterized by an increase in the use of rights-based language and a decrease in the use of social-retrenchment language, which however has not been completely abandoned. Therefore, the recalibration of EC’s speeches on social policy has not been abrupt but has instead been incremental. The article concludes by discussing preliminary interpretations of the observed trends and their potential implications in terms of ‘discursive legacy’ in the post-pandemic era.

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The battle of ideas on the euro crisis: evidence from ECB inter-meeting speeches

Cited by 35 publications

References 57 publications

Exports vs. investment: How political discourse shapes popular support for external imbalances

Exports vs. investment: How political discourse shapes popular support for external imbalances

Let's speak more? How the ECB responds to public contestation

Speaking social Europe: A paradigmatic shift in the European Commission Presidents’ social policy discourse?

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