Does Deliberation Matter for Monetary Policy-Making?
Does Deliberation Matter for Monetary Policy-Making?
Deliberation is an understudied area of policy-making, in part because it is a challenging task. First, it is hard to reduce words into a measurable form while maintaining the integrity of the concepts and arguments. Second, even if we can capture the content of deliberation in a more systematic fashion that preserves meaning, we face the question of how we then assess whether and how deliberation makes a difference. This book finds that deliberation matters because it can change the views and preferences of participants, and these changes can in turn result in both abrupt policy consequences (e.g., the Volcker Revolution) and longer term policy consequences (e.g., cementing a legislative consensus around the primacy of low inflation as a precursor to stable economic growth). Simply put, deliberation matters in a process where policy is made in a committee setting because committee members (1) seek to persuade others to alter their views and (2) are themselves persuaded to revise their own views. The views of committee members are malleable. Thus, it is not satisfactory to assess policymaking using just a crude measurement of preferences in a statistical framework.
Keywords: Deliberation, Low inflation consensus, Preferences, Congress, Volcker Revolution
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