Technocrats, Reputation, and Responsiveness in Policy Explanation

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.