When Central Banks Go Green: Public Opinion and Monetary Policy Legitimacy

Climate change presents unelected central banks with an acute dilemma: acting on climate change risks charges of mandate overreach, while failing to act risks charges of institutional failure. Yet public opinion on green central banking remains unstudied. We address this gap with two survey experiments in Germany and the Netherlands. A conjoint experiment shows that adding environmental conditionality to corporate bond purchases significantly increases support for quantitative easing, suggesting that greening can rehabilitate contested unconventional policies.
A framing experiment reveals that institutional objections about price stability
and democratic legitimacy erode support more than distributive objections about job losses or asset devaluation, inverting expectations from the climate politics literature. Respondents who trust the central bank most are paradoxically most responsive to arguments for and against it. Public trust in delegated institutions is thus not a blank check; it is a license granted on terms, policed most attentively by the institution’s own supporters.