Among the most relevant bureaucratic appointments that elected politicians make is the choice of central bank governors. While such an office has, no doubt, high intrinsic value (a decent salary, high public esteem), its importance is mostly derived from the influence that central bankers wield over the monetary policy of a country. It is therefore little surprising that government politicians care a great deal about the ideological views of the appointees to the central bank governorship. Although estimates of appointee ideology are hard to come by in the absence of individual voting records on monetary policy committees (in which case ideal point estimation is possible, see for instance Chang 2003, Hix et al. 2010), we can use party affiliation as a reasonable proxy for policy preferences.
This paper draws on a new data set on 200 appointments of central bank governors in 29 European countries (EU-27 plus Norway, Iceland) between 1945 and 2012 to investigate the effects that government ideology, ministerial ideology, central bank independence, and inflation have on the appointment of central bank governors. It thus presents one of the first large-n comparative analyses of bureaucratic appointments in Europe. In so doing, the paper seeks to advance the literature on party patronage and political appointments by shifting the focus from the dependent variable (the extent of politicized appointments) to the independent variables (explaining who gets appointed).
References:
Chang, Kelly H. (2003). Appointing Central Bankers. The Politics of Monetary Policy in the United States and the European Monetary Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hix, Simon, Bjørn Høyland, and Nick Vivyan (2010). ‘From doves to hawks: A spatial analysis of voting in the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England.’ European Journal of Political Research 49 (6): 731–758.
