Technocrats, Reputation, and Responsiveness in Policy Explanation
研究技术官僚机构在面临绩效声誉威胁时，其政策解释的语言是否更面向公众。基于英国央行货币政策委员会1997-2024年演讲数据，发现感知绩效差时语言更以人民为中心，但实际绩效差时反而更少关注公众。
ABSTRACT In contemporary democracies, independent technocratic bodies take many key policy decisions. The organizations are meant to avoid traditional policy responsiveness, but still have processes in place to take into account societal views. Our study analyzes how pressure on technocratic bodies affects the audience orientation of their policy explanations. Taking a reputational perspective, we argue that the policy explanations provided by technocrats whose legitimacy depends on their outcomes will be influenced by performance‐based reputational threats. We hypothesize that such threats—whether based on perceptions or performance indicators—lead technocrats to orient themselves more toward the wider public, which we operationalize as accessibility and people centeredness of the language. We test our hypotheses on a new dataset of speeches of members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (1997–2024). Though accessibility cannot be traced back to performance‐based threats, people centeredness is affected. Yet, while negative performance‐based perceptions are associated with more people‐centered policy explanation, negative measured performance leads technocrats to center less on people. Our findings contribute to the literature on reputation, audience orientation, and communicative responsiveness, and suggest differential effects based on whether performance is perceived or measured.