Explanations and Accountability: An Analysis of UK Parliamentary Oversight of Monetary Policy, Financial Stability and Fiscal Policy, 2010-15

In the UK, scrutiny of government policies is conducted in parliamentary committee hearings. In economic policy, two very different sets of actors are routinely scrutinized: (1) officials of the Bank of England—who are themselves not elected but appointed—are held accountable by committees in Parliament for their decisions in respect of their objectives towards monetary policy and financial stability; and (2) elected ministers and unelected officials from the Treasury are similarly held accountable for their objectives towards fiscal policy. In short, legislative hearings entail MPs probing both central bankers and Treasury officials: reasoned argument is therefore central to the purpose and focus of the hearings—that is, they are intended as a deliberative forum. This paper contributes to the growing empirical work on deliberation by focusing on oversight of monetary policy, financial stability and fiscal policy in both the upper and lower houses of Parliament. Whereas the Treasury Select Committee (TSC) in the House of Commons has sole statutory authority to scrutinize both the Bank and the Treasury, the Lords Economic Affairs Committee (EAC) also exercises its own power to hold hearings with these two groups. Studying deliberation in both the TSC and the EAC allows us to vary the deliberative setting to include (1) an elected body (the TSC) questioning both unelected officials from the Bank and elected officials from the Treasury; and (2) an unelected body (the EAC) similarly questioning both unelected and elected officials. This study seeks to gauge the extent to which oversight varies between unelected and elected officials, but also to ascertain whether there exist clear differences between MPs and peers as they deliberate in roughly equivalent committee hearings. Automated text analysis is used to analyse the verbatim hearings for the complete set of 36 hearings, held over the whole of the 2010-15 Parliament.