You talking to me? MEP Questions in the Monetary Dialogues

The quarterly monetary dialogues provide an important opportunity for the European Parliament (EP) to perform its oversight role through the discussion of structured questions provided to the European Central Bank (ECB) President. Ostensibly these questions should focus on gathering information relevant the specific tasks of the ECB within its policy remit, including specifically monetary policy. However, recent analysis of MEP questions during the monetary dialogues has shown that there are different types of questions, extending beyond oversight to include efforts to hold the ECB accountable and questions aimed at exerting influence over policy outcomes (Kreppel and Tomasi, 2025). Moreover, these questions address a variety of topics, including many that lie outside the jurisdiction of the ECB. This research investigates those MEP questions aimed at influencing policy to determine why such questions are being asked within the context of the monetary dialogues and what the goals of such questions are. Both the independence of the ECB and its limited decision-making jurisdiction suggest that MEP questions may not be intended for the ECB as much as an external audience. Indeed, previous studies have shown that legislators use questions as a mechanism to increase political visibility of an issue or used by opposition parties to highlight “weakness” in the government (Martin 2013; Otjes and Louwerse 2017). In this research we use the MEP question dataset from Kreppel and Tomasi (2025) to gain greater insight into the use of the monetary dialogues as a tool of policy influence through the analysis of MEP “influence” type questions to determine the intended audience, substantive policy arena and their political objective. Our goal is to understand under what circumstances the monetary dialogues are used as a tool of influence, rather than oversight.