Obsolete but influential? the role of national central banks in shaping the European central bank agenda

It has been well established that central bank policy agendas are shaped by the spread of ideas, the agency of individual governors, and economic and political pressures. In the case of the Eurosystem, however, the role of the National Central Banks (NCBs) remains puzzling. With the creation of the European Central Bank (ECB), their primary function – monetary policymaking – was transferred to the supranational level, raising the question of whether NCBs have become obsolete. This paper argues that NCBs act as intermediaries, channelling national and public priorities upward to the ECB and thereby influencing its policy agenda. Using BERTopic, alongside sequence and cross-sectional time-series analyses of ECB and NCB speeches from 1997 to 2024, I find that the ECB's agenda and issue-responsiveness vis-a-vis ‘new’ topics are driven primarily by NCBs. By introducing and validating a novel measure of responsiveness through sequence analysis, I also contribute more broadly to the literature on responsiveness and the EU's multi-level governance, while shedding new light on how institutions deemed ‘post-obsolescence’ continue to shape supranational policy agendas.