Political central bank coverage
Résumé
We introduce the concept of Political Central Bank Coverage (PCBC), which refers to the influence of monetary policy-related media coverage on the popularity of political parties. Our study focuses on Germany and examines the period between January 2005 and December 2021. To explore PCBC, we gathered monthly popularity ratings for six German political parties. Through textual analysis we measured media coverage of monetary policy. Subsequently, we estimated popularity functions for the political parties, incorporating our textual measures and a dummy variable indicating the month prior to an election. Our findings highlight the existence of PCBCs in Germany in the month preceding federal elections and elections to the European Parliament. Importantly, these results remain robust across various methodological approaches, including the use of a seemingly unrelated regressions model, alternative preelectoral periods and different occurrence and sentiment measures. Furthermore, our study suggests that the presence of PCBC may be influenced by the partisanship of newspapers considered and the direct communication of the European Central Bank.