TY - JOUR A1 - Hallerberg, Mark A1 - Baerg, Nicole T1 - Explaining Instability in the Stability and Growth Pact The Contribution of Member State Power and Euroskepticism to the Euro Crisis JF - Comparative Political Studies N2 - The Stability and Growth Pact clearly failed to prevent the euro crisis. We contend that the failure was due largely to the ability of the Member States to undermine the Pact’s operation. The European Commission served as a “watchdog” to monitor fiscal performance. The Member States themselves, however, collectively had the ability to change the content of the reports for individual states. We confirm the expectation that powerful Member States had the most success in undermining the role of the Commission. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find supporting evidence for our argument that governments with euroskeptic populations behind them were also more successful in weakening the Commission’s warnings. These results have broader theoretical implications concerning which mechanisms explain country-specific outcomes under a shared rule. Another contribution is the creation of a new data set of European Commission assessments of Member State economic programs and Council of Minister revisions. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414016633230 SN - 1552-3829 VL - 49 IS - 7 SP - 968 EP - 1009 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baerg, Nicole A1 - Hallerberg, Mark T1 - Council Checks of the Commission under the European Semester: Does Member State Power and Euroscepticism Still Matter? JF - Journal of Common Market Studies N2 - The European Commission recommends evaluations of the economic plans of member states. The Council then provides final text. Previous research suggests that the Council selectively edits the Commission's recommendations. Both large member states and those with eurosceptic populations are likely to have the Council weaken what the Commission writes about them. We examine the determinants of the Council's editing of these texts after the introduction of the European Semester in the period 2011–18. We also account for different varieties of euroscepticism as the literature has become more differentiated. Using metrics of textual changes based on automated and hand-coding, we find little evidence of a systematic relationship between euroscepticism and textual editing. We do, however, find evidence that member state's voting power and euro status matters. Our findings suggest that eurosceptic no longer affects textual editing of such documents under the European Semester. KW - European Semester; Economic and Monetary Union; European Commission Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13268 VL - 60 IS - 1 SP - 58 EP - 80 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baerg, Nicole A1 - Duell, Dominik A1 - Lowe, Will T1 - Central Bank Communication as Public Opinion? JF - Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy N2 - The legitimacy of central banks is on the decline in many countries yet support for central banks is thought to be essential for the successful conduct of monetary policy. Embedding survey vignette experiments into three panel survey waves of German citizens, we examine how support for the European Central Bank (ECB) and the central bank’s communication style affects a respondent’s inflation expectations. Our experiments show that while information effects exist, such effects are heterogeneous across different societal groups. We find that information effects are strongest among those who already support the European project and the ECB. Our findings have important implications for the public outreach strategies of central banks. Further, in the aggregate, our results also suggest that Euroskepticism likely has inflationary effects. KW - ECB, inflation expectations, information, populism, survey experiments Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1561/113.00000123 SN - 2689-4815 VL - 6 IS - 2 SP - 211 EP - 247 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baerg, Nicole A1 - Lowe, Will T1 - A textual Taylor rule: estimating central bank preferences combining topic and scaling methods JF - Political Science Research and Methods N2 - Scholars often use voting data to estimate central bankers’ policy preferences but consensus voting is commonplace. To get around this, we combine topic-based text analysis and scaling methods to generate theoretically motivated comparative measures of central bank preferences on the US Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) leading up to the financial crisis in a way that does not depend on voting behavior. We apply these measures to a number of applications in the literature. For example, we find that FOMC members that are Federal Reserve Bank Presidents from districts experiencing higher unemployment are also more likely to emphasize unemployment in their speech. We also confirm that committee members on schedule to vote are more likely to express consensus opinion than their off schedule voting counterparts. Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2018.31 VL - 8 IS - 1 SP - 106 EP - 122 ER -