Alright sickos, here’s even more charts about the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee – Beragampengetahuan

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A nice thing about beragampengetahuan Alphaville is that our commenters usually make better points than we do. See, for example, SE Cynic beneath yesterday’s Bank of England post (which you should go read first), who not only pointed out we’d mildly borked the methodology, but also had a great suggestion for further content:

Our initial response was despair, as we’d have to remake the spreadsheet, but then we remembered that it was an opportunity to do more charts. So here goes.

The voting history of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee can be downloaded here (direct .xlsx link, go here if you’d rather have the same experience via bankofengland.co.uk).

It lists all the current and former members, how they voted on rates at each meeting they attended, and the Bank Rate following that meeting. In some early meetings, rather than a specific rate preference, it simply says “Increase” or “Decrease”:

Therefore, despite our previous stubborn refusal to do so, looking at hawks vs doves is quite easy: compare for any given member whether their preference was above the outcome or “Increase”, for hawks, or below/“Decrease”, for doves.

Et voilà (we’ve expressed dovish votes as negative for reasons that are hopefully obvious):

You might have been able to eyeball it but, totting those votes up, an external hawk is the most common type of BoE rebel in crude terms. Internal doves are the least common:

That figure needs some adjusting, because the composition of the MPC (usually five internals versus four externals) means that there have been more internal than external votes overall. Luckily for narrative simplicity, doing so doesn’t affect the rankings much:

So, basically, SE Cynic was right: internal doves are hard to find. Hooray for the readers!

One further benefit from this is that we can do an all-time BoE hawk vs dove ranking. We’ve ordered this from most hawkish to most dovish, based on each member’s net totals. Feast your eyes:

As ever, holla @ us in the comments if anything looks egregiously wrong, because data journalism is hard and we probably have mild sunstroke.