Research Design and Elements

National Bank of Romania’s public communication changed, after 2008, mainly due to the intensification of nonmonetary communication, which eclipsed the communication of monetary policy objectives. The NBR was at the forefront of important public debates, that were not related to monetary policy objectives, but which attracted the attention of large audiences. These public debates such as the giving in payment law, the crisis of the Greek capital banks, and the Swiss francs credit crisis required more active public communication on behalf of the NBR, which was on an upward trend in transparency, but, at the same time, on a downward trend in terms of public confidence. This work paves the way for the entire research project, and defines the roles of all actors with an impact on NBR’s communication considered during qualitative and quantitative analysis—specialized public, general public, mass media, and the Parliament. The research model adapts the frames according to the “cascading network activation” model (Entman, Political Communication, 20(4):415–432, 2003), following the flow from the messages sent by the main actors—in this case, the NBR, but also the Parliament, the messages taken over by the elites, then by journalists, the framing of the news as it reaches the general public and then the reverse flow, in the defined post-crisis context.