Annually, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland holds elections for positions held by directors of the main office’s board whose terms expire on the last day of the calendar year. Off-cycle elections are conducted when vacancies occur during the year. Member banks participate in the election by nominating and then voting on Class A and Class B director candidates.

Graph and download economic data for Equity Market Volatility Tracker: Elections And Political Governance (EMVELECTGOVRN) from Jan 1985 to Oct 2025 about political, volatility, uncertainty, equity, government, and USA.

Scholars often use voting data to estimate central bankers' policy preferences but consensus voting is commonplace. To get around this, we combine topic-based text analysis and scaling methods to generate theoretically motivated comparative measures of central bank preferences on the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee leading up to the financial crisis in a way that does not depend on voting behavior. We apply these measures to a number of applications in the literature. For example, we find that FOMC members that are Federal Reserve Bank Presidents from districts experiencing higher unemployment are also more likely to emphasize unemployment in their speech. We also confirm that committee members on schedule to vote are more likely to express consensus opinion than their off schedule voting counterparts.