Oversight, Accountability, or Influence? Understanding the use of monetary dialogues in the European Parliament

The scholarship on the interaction between the European Parliament (EP) and the European Central Bank (ECB) within the framework of the Monetary Dialogue (MD) is well developed and offers an insightful discussion on the effectiveness of the dialogue as a forum for ECB accountability. However, most of the literature has focused on what the ECB is held accountable for, how well the EP holds the ECB to account, or how the ECB engages in, and what it communicates during, the dialogues. Key questions remain that this paper seeks to address. First, we develop a theoretical framework that moves beyond a general broad notion of "accountability" and differentiates between notions of accountability, oversight, and influence. By defining the concepts more precisely, our aim is to distinguish types of engagement and offer a comparative perspective to broaden the discussion of accountability forums. Second, our paper contributes to a growing subset of literature on the MD that shifts the focus from what the ECB gets from the dialogues to how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) utilize the MD. To achieve this, we analyse and code MEP questions during the quarterly Monetary Dialogue. Our preliminary findings show that there while there are clear patterns of change in the type of questions asked across time, they are not as clearly linked to events as anticipated. In contrast, our expectations regarding the links between party MEP and party group characteristics and the type of questions asked are largely substantiated.