Do reputational concerns affect the communicative patterns of regulatory agencies, i.e., their inclination to abstain from responding or to make use of distinct types of responses when facing public scrutiny? Looking at the fine balance between regulatory silence and rhetoric, we hypothesize that a unified regulator is more likely to keep silent over issues regarding which it generally enjoys a strong reputation, and more likely to respond to opinions about functional areas with regards to which it has a generally weak reputation. We also expect that a unified regulator is most likely to respond to opinions when an issue is publicly salient and cannot be easily de-politicized. An empirical investigation of the Israeli bank supervisor’s interventions (i.e., direct and indirect responses) in the public arena from 1998 until mid 2009, provides strong support for these hypotheses. These findings are important because they indicate that reputational concerns create distinct communicative patterns across audiences and functional areas. They also demonstrate that words are action, and, occasionally, so is regulatory silence.
