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⁵ Randomly drawn from the entire set of 620 non-inquired issues identified for the research period.

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¹⁰ Sulitzeanu-Kenan , Raanan , ‘If They Get It Right: An Experimental Test of the Effects of the Appointment and Reports of UK Public Inquiries’ , Public Administration , 84 ( 2006 ): 623 ? 653 CrossRef Google Scholar . Conditions 5 and 6 are meant to exclude policy advice commissions (see Wheare , Kenneth C. , Government by Committee ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1955 ), pp. 43 ? 44 Google Scholar ; and Howe , , ‘The Management of Public Inquiries’, p. 294 Google Scholar ). Sulitzeanu-Kenan’s definition includes a seventh criterion ? ‘that the inquiry is held in public’. This criterion was relaxed in this study for several reasons. A number of non-public independent inquiries were appointed in response to major events in recent British political history, and some have consequently taken an important place on the public agenda. Indeed, many accounts of public inquiries in the United Kingdom include ‘private’ ones, usually without acknowledging the distinction, and sometimes explicitly, as in Annex 1 of the 2005 Public Administration Select Committee which includes some non-public inquiries in its comprehensive list of ‘public inquiries’ since 1921. It is expected that the decision to appoint an independent non-public inquiry will share a considerable degree of the attributes of the decision to appoint a public one. Omitting the former decisions from the analysis would unduly reduce the number of cases (limited as it is), and coding them as ‘zero’ investigative response is likely to bias the results.

¹¹ That is, a government formed by a different party, e.g., events that took place under the Major (Conservative) government are ‘historical’ when addressed by the Blair (Labour) government, yet events that took place under Thatcher (Conservative) are not ‘historical’ when addressed by the Major government.

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¹³ Boin , Arjen , ‘Learning from Crisis: NASA and the Challenger Disaster’, in Boin, McConnell and 't Hart, eds, Governing After Crisis , pp. 232 ? 254 Google Scholar ; Bovens , Mark , 't Hart , Paul , Dekker , Sander and Verheuvel , Gerdien , ‘The Politics of Blame Avoidance: Defensive Tactics in a Dutch Crime-Fighting Fiasco’, in H. Anheier, ed., When Things Go Wrong ( Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage , 1999 ), pp. 123 ? 148 Google Scholar ; Brandstrom , Annika and Kuipers , Sanneke , ‘From “Normal Incidents” to Political Crises: Understanding the Selective Politicization of Policy Failures’ , Government and Opposition , 38 ( 2003 ), 279 ? 305 CrossRef Google Scholar ; Drewry , Gavin , ‘Judicial Inquiries and Public Reassurance’ , Public Law ( 1996 ), pp. 368 ? 383 Google Scholar ; Kremnitzer , Mordechai , ‘The Landau Commission Report ? Was the Security Service Subordinated to the Law or the Law to the 'Needs' of Security?’ , Israel Law Review , 23 ( 1989 ), 216 ? 279 Google Scholar ; McLean , Iain and Johnes , Martin , Aberfan: Government & Disaster ( Cardiff : Welsh Academic Press , 2000 ) Google Scholar ; McLean and Johnes, ‘Regulation Run Mad’; Parker and Dekker, ‘September 11 and Post Crisis Investigation’; Polidano, ‘An Exocet in a Red Box’; Schwartz , Robert , and McConnell , Allan , ‘The Walkerton Water Tragedy and the Jerusalem Banquet Hall Collapse: Regulatory Failure and Policy Change’, in Boin, McConnell and 't Hart, eds, Governing After Crisis , pp. 208 ? 231 Google Scholar ; Staelraeve , Sofie and Hart , Paul ‘t , ‘Dutroux and Dioxin: Crisis Investigations, Elite Accountability and Institutional Reform in Belgium, in Boin, McConnell and 't Hart, eds, Governing After Crisis , pp. 148 ? 182 Google Scholar ; Winetrobe , Barry K. , ‘Inquiries after Scott: The Return of the Tribunal of Inquiry’ , Public Law ( 1997 ), 18 ? 31 Google Scholar .

¹⁴ As Boin et al . explicitly acknowledge: Boin , et al. , ‘Conclusion’, pp. 287 ? 288 . Google Scholar

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¹⁶ Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act 1921, Inquiries Act 2005.

¹⁷ Council on Tribunals 1996, Public Administration Select Committee, Government by Inquiry , p. 66.

¹⁸ At the time of writing these lines, the most recent formal document on this matter is the 2005 Inquiries Act, in which Section 1(1) states only that “A Minister may cause an inquiry to be held under this Act in relation to a case where it appears to him that: (a) particular events have caused, or are capable of causing, public concern, or (b) there is public concern that particular events may have occurred.

¹⁹ Brown , Michael , ‘Iain Duncan Smith has missed an open goal, but he has one more chance’ , Independent , 2 September 2003 Google Scholar ; Hunt , John , ‘Determined effort to suppress Burgess and Maclean affair’ , Financial Times , 2 January 1986 Google Scholar ; Parker and Dekker, ‘September 11 and Post Crisis Investigation’; Public Administration Select Committee, Government by Inquiry , p. 9.

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²⁴ In addition, it has been argued that the appointment of an inquiry serves to ‘block’ other investigative procedures ? e.g., of parliamentary committees or criminal proceedings ? as a result of rules and conventions governing conflicts of institutional investigative authority and freedom of speech, and particularly of the press (e.g., sub judice ): Elliot , and McGuinness , , ‘Public Inquiry’, p. 21 Google Scholar ; Flinders , , The Politics of Accountability in the Modern State , p. 164 Google Scholar ; Kremnitzer, ‘The Landau Commission Report’; Polidano, ‘An Exocet in a Red Box’.

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²⁶ Former Deputy Prime Minister Lord Heseltine in his testimony before the British Public Administration Select Committee, Public Administration Select Committee, Government by Inquiry , p. 9; See also Brown , , ‘Iain Duncan Smith has missed an open goal’, p. 14 Google Scholar ; Parker , and Dekker , , ‘September 11 and Post Crisis Investigation’ Google Scholar .

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²⁸ As quoted by Hunt , , ‘Determined effort to suppress Burgess and Maclean affair’. Google Scholar

²⁹ Weaver , , ‘The Politics of Blame Avoidance’, p. 372 . Google Scholar

³⁰ Weaver , , ‘The Politics of Blame Avoidance’, p. 380 Google Scholar ; see also Arnold , Douglas R. , The Logic of Congressional Action ( New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press , 1990 ) Google Scholar .

³¹ For a review of this literature, see Soroka , Stuart N. , ‘Good News and Bad News: Asymmetric Responses to Economic Information’ , Journal of Politics , 68 ( 2006 ), 372 ? 375 CrossRef Google Scholar . For the psychological basis of this social phenomenon, see Tversky , Amos and Kahneman , Daniel , ‘The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice’ , Science , 211 ( 1981 ), 453 CrossRef Google Scholar .

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³⁴ One exception is Hood , et al. , ‘Testing Times’. Google Scholar

³⁵ Justifications ‘deny some or any measure of offensiveness in the act for which the individual admits responsibility’ ( McGraw , Kathleen M. , ‘Managing Blame: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Political Accounts’ , American Political Science Review , 85 ( 1991 ), 1133 ? 1157 , p. 1136. CrossRef Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ These include: government popularity; indicator variables for the identity of the prime minister; and an indicator variable for issues that have previously been on the agenda as inquiry-issues.

⁴⁵ The broadsheets were selected based on the availability in the Lexis-Nexis database in different years: January?July 1984: Financial Times (the only period for which only one newspaper was used); August 1984 ? June 1985: Financial Times and Guardian ; July 1985 ? December 1988: Guardian and The Times ; 1989 ? 2003: The Times and Independent .

⁴⁶ The identification of an ‘inquiry’ followed the six criteria adopted from Sulitzeanu-Kenan, ‘If They Get it Right’, p. 5. A similar method was employed by Dewan , Torun and Dowding , Keith , ‘The Corrective Effect of Ministerial Resignations on Government Popularity’ , American Journal of Political Science , 49 ( 2005 ), 46 ? 55 CrossRef Google Scholar ; and Dowding , Keith and Kang , Won Taek , ‘Ministerial Resignations 1945?97’ , Public Administration , 76 ( 1998 ), 411 ? 429 CrossRef Google Scholar , for their studies of ministerial resignations.

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⁴⁸ For example, the 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ incident, which indeed had a second inquiry; and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, which did not receive a second inquiry.

⁴⁹ Variations in the number of non-inquired issues are visually evident, yet no significant differences were found between election and non-election periods, between prime ministers, and between government terms.

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⁵³ The original coding instructions included four categories. The first two ? ‘private individuals or corporations’ and ‘local authorities’ were merged into one category ? ‘remote blame’ (see coding instruction in Appendix 1).

⁵⁴ Treating the coding as nominal data resulted in Krippendorff’s α = 0.6292, well below the lower limit of the 95 per cent confidence interval (0.7026), providing support to the coders’ ordinal conceptions. See Hayes , Andrew F. and Krippendorff , Klaus , ‘Answering the Call for a Standard Reliability Measure for Coding Data’ , Communication Methods and Measures , 1 ( 2007 ), 77 ? 89 . CrossRef Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Even when a specific event is asked about, the question rarely appears more than once.

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⁵⁷ This measure is a simplified index of media salience, after pre-tests have suggested that the use of a more complex index, which included the number of words per article and placement in the newspaper added very little information (5 per cent).

⁵⁸ Comparing the media salience of twenty inquiry issues between the Independent and The Times (averaged) to the Daily Mail (including the Sunday editions of all three newspapers) yielded a strong and significant correlation: r = 0.807, p < 0.001.

⁵⁹ For example, in the Dunblane shooting of 1996, and following the death of Dr David Kelly in 2003.

⁶⁰ For another use of (more distant) future conditions as a predictor of current behaviour, see Smith , Alastair , Election Timing ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2004 ), p. 113 . Google Scholar

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⁶⁴ With low salience, the association was insignificant, and it is only at higher salience levels, a positive relationship is reported.

⁶⁵ The research period is almost equally divided among the three prime ministers: Thatcher, seven years; Major, 6.5 years; and Blair, 6.5 years.

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⁶⁸ Additional political variables were included in early analyses (see below), yet were omitted from the analysis reported here: overall time-trend, government term, and early/late term of a prime minister.

⁶⁹ Using the corrected regression constant based on the fraction of inquiries in the population ( τ = 0.066) ( King , and Zeng , , ‘Logistic Regression in Rare Event Data’ Google Scholar ), and for median media salience (3.25), modal election period (0), mean electoral support (?0.25), modal prime minister (Major), and modal previous refusal (0).

⁷⁰ Following a similar method, when holding blame attribution at its modal ? remote blame.

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⁷³ The ‘casualty × previous refusal’ interaction term was significant ( p < 0.001).

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⁷⁷ Borrowing the terminology of Maor, ‘Feeling the Heat?’

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