Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey and Andrew Bailey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780262019576
- eISBN:
- 9780262314725
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262019576.003.0002
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Macro- and Monetary Economics
This chapter briefly surveys the difficulties in measuring empirically the motivations of members of congressional committees and the FOMC. It challenges the bias against the empirical investigation ...
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This chapter briefly surveys the difficulties in measuring empirically the motivations of members of congressional committees and the FOMC. It challenges the bias against the empirical investigation of political “talk”, and particularly deliberation within committee settings. Deliberation is defined as exhibiting the important characteristic of reason-giving, so that deliberative discourse would entail members of the FOMC and legislators providing reasons for their positions, and responding to those of others. Ultimately, then, members must be willing to be persuaded by the merits of their colleagues’ reasoned argument. This chapter sets out a number of hypotheses for what we might expect to find within FOMC and congressional committee deliberation, with attention given to the effects of key institutional and ideational features that may affect deliberation—e.g., committee rules and procedures, transparency, clarity of the policy objective, and the degree of consensus surrounding the role of monetary policy in the economy.Less
This chapter briefly surveys the difficulties in measuring empirically the motivations of members of congressional committees and the FOMC. It challenges the bias against the empirical investigation of political “talk”, and particularly deliberation within committee settings. Deliberation is defined as exhibiting the important characteristic of reason-giving, so that deliberative discourse would entail members of the FOMC and legislators providing reasons for their positions, and responding to those of others. Ultimately, then, members must be willing to be persuaded by the merits of their colleagues’ reasoned argument. This chapter sets out a number of hypotheses for what we might expect to find within FOMC and congressional committee deliberation, with attention given to the effects of key institutional and ideational features that may affect deliberation—e.g., committee rules and procedures, transparency, clarity of the policy objective, and the degree of consensus surrounding the role of monetary policy in the economy.
