The Rise of Central Bank Talk: Essays in Central Bank Communication and Independence

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

PhD thesis defence by Lauren Leek

Both central bank independence and central bank communication have drastically expanded globally in recent decades. This thesis addresses a puzzling paradox: how do central banks reconcile their independent status with extensive public communication that goes beyond their narrow mandates? I argue that central bank communication is not merely a neutral tool for information transmission; it is dynamically shaped by and employed to address perceived challenges to their independence. This perspective conceptualises independence as an ongoing process, requiring continuous responsiveness to economic and societal realities beyond its formal institutional design. Central banks, therefore, consider more than just their statutory independence; they actively seek public support and macro-economic coordination to effectively fulfil their mandates. To examine the relationship between central bank independence and communication, I leverage Large Language Models to systematically uncover latent insights from an extensive dataset of speeches from 119 central banks worldwide (1997-2024). This significantly broadens the empirical scope beyond traditional studies focusing mainly on central banks in high-income democracies. The publicly available dataset, which includes novel metadata, is accessible at centralbanktalk.eu. The dissertation comprises three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 examines how central bank independence shapes communication in response to monetary and financial pressures. Chapter 3 explores how independent central banks - particularly within the multilevel framework of the Eurosystem - respond in communication to broader societal issues and regionally diverse political demands. Chapter 4 introduces a novel textual measure of central bank pressure on monetary policy, introducing a distinction between coordination and dominance in macroeconomic policy linkages. Together, these chapters offer new insights into the evolving political economy of central banking and the role of communication in sustaining an adaptive form of central bank independence.

Lauren Leek is a PhD researcher at the EUI, a research fellow in computational social science in the DIVIDED project and a senior research scientist in the methods team at the Verian Group UK. Her main research interests centre around social data science and measurement in the field of political economy and political science. During her PhD she was a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics and a PhD trainee at the European Central Bank (DG Economics).