Anna ZECH

Bio

Anna is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Doctoral Fellow at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Université Libre de Bruxelles within the GEM-Diamond project. Under the joint supervision of Antoine Vauchez (Paris 1) and Amandine Crespy (ULB), her doctoral project examines to what extent the European Central Bank engages strategically with its politicisation.

Anna holds an MA (Hons) in Business/Management and Italian from the University of Glasgow, a Graduate Diploma in International Relations from the University of London, an MA in European Affairs with a specialisation in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris and an MSc in Political Economy of Europe from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Following the completion of her degree from the London School of Economics, Anna spent a year working at Bloomberg LP in London.
 

CV

2022 – present            
Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (CESSP) & Université Libre de Bruxelles (IEE & CEVIPOL)
Marie Curie Doctoral Fellow in GEM-Diamond Project

2021-2022                  
Bloomberg LP – European Headquarters London
Customer Service

2019-2021                  
Sciences Po Paris and London School of Economics and Political Science
Dual Degree in European Studies
Sciences Po Paris – MA European Affairs, Economics and Public Policy
LSE – MSc Political Economy of Europe

2020                           
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Two-month internship with Dr Björn Bremer

2018-2019                  
University of London International Programmes
GradDip International Relations

2013-2018                  
University of Glasgow
MA (Hons) Business/Management and Italian
Honours of the First Class with Distinction in Spoken Italian

2015-2016                  
Università degli Studi di Bologna
Language Year Abroad

 

Abstract of her project

Watching the Watchers

On the Expert Networks Translating European Central Bank Communication
 

The ECB has increasingly stretched its mandate in the face of conflicting pressures arising from its responsibility to maintain both price and financial stability. Alongside the lack of a full-blown fiscal counterpart at EU level that can provide macroeconomic stabilisation, this context has encouraged monetary policy innovation. The latter, particularly when impacting sovereign debt markets, brings about recurrent political struggles and increasingly complicates the ECB’s independence. In response to growing dissensus and in line with an exhaustion of other monetary policy instruments in a zero lower bound environment, the ECB has significantly expanded its communication in the form of forward guidance and beyond, in particular with the ‘general’ public.
 

While there is a substantial amount of research on central bank communication (cf Blinder et al, 2001/2008/2022), the literature’s focus on ECB-owned output fails to adequately reflect the fact that close to 60% of its Eurozone audience learns about the ECB and its policies through indirect sources only (Assenmacher et al, 2021:55). Initial research on the interaction between the ECB and the media (e.g. Ferrara & Angino, 2022; Koop & Scotto di Vettimo, 2023) focuses on broad measures of quantitative text analysis such as the extent of coverage and sentiment analysis, but does not speak to actors’ backgrounds, networks or their sensemaking function about which we know little (Ibrocevic PhD Thesis 2023; Mudge & Vauchez, 2012/2016; Schmidt-Wellenburg, 2017). It therefore remains unclear how and to what end these translators engage with the ECB’s discourse, and vice versa.

Researching these actors can then facilitate an improved understanding of the ECB’s interaction with its publics, moving beyond a top-down approach that is focused on ECB output, and elucidate how the need for a unified monetary policy discourse on the one and diverse (national) audiences, on the other hand, is negotiated in practice. Learning about these expert communicative networks will furthermore yield broader lessons about legitimacy and accountability of international technocratic actors more generally, in the Eurozone and beyond, in an era of “technopopulism” and “emergency politics” that often prominently feature technocratic and/or executive actors (Bickerton & Accetti, 2021; White, 2015).
 

Empirically, the project therefore proposes to study the so-called ECB Watchers, a diverse group of financial market and media actors as well as academics, in their role as translators between the ECB and its audiences as they “play an important role in interpreting central bank actions, disseminating and deciphering for the broad public the information released by central banks” and in “provid[ing] alternative opinions, lessening the monopolistics power of central banks” (Blinder et al, 2001:26). Following an initial investigation of the ECB’s approach to these translators via interviews and document analysis, the project proposes to characterise them in prosopographic and relational terms by way of two of the main conferences they participate in – the IMFS’ ECB and Its Watchers Conference and the ECB’s Forum on Central Banking. Having identified key actors in these networks via social network analysis and their attributes via multiple correspondence analysis, the project finally aims to examine these communicative dynamics in practice by studying how and what kind of inflation narratives these actors disseminated (in the media) between 2020 and 2022.