Independence is a cornerstone of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) institutional design. However, during the Euro crisis, the central bank’s actions, ranging from interfering in domestic affairs of countries to expanding its mandate to supervise banks, triggered massive public criticism and a debate about the ECB’s accountability. This raises the question of the compatibility of independence and accountability. Building on the principal-agent, accountability and EU governance literature, we argue in this paper first that a constellation of high independence with weakly developed accountability mechanisms undermine in the long-term the trust of principals and public opinion in the agent and thus decrease acceptance of the ECB’s decisions. Second, whereas a majority of studies focus on the transparency dimension of accountability, in this piece we add controllability, responsibility, responsiveness and liability as central dimensions of accountability. We show first that when several of these dimensions are weakly developed, this is more likely to lead to an erosion of authority and thus decline of acceptance of the ECB’s decisions. Second, taking these five dimensions seriously would allow the ECB to re-establish its partially lost reputation and to increase its public acceptance.
