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AbstractThe dominant sociological view is that there are too many public crises. This article points to a different problem, namely the tendency for societalization to stall and for too few public crises to be fully realized. Anchored in a detailed analysis of the response to the UK Metropolitan police killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the article explores how crisis-events unfold, from their early conception in media coverage through to their treatment as events to be investigated and reviewed. A particular point of focus is the role of a soft legal realm in handling the second of these phases of societalization. In sketching out the work, principles and functions of the soft legal realm, the article suggests that we conceive of this as an interstitial institution, one that, in the early twenty-first century, has become predominantly responsible for the translation and treatment of would-be public crises in the UK, and beyond. The article ends by identifying a set of key threats to the legitimacy of this institution in managing the messy border relations of the civil and non-civil sphere.

Governments around the world are building online infrastructures which they hope will become the main channels through which they interact with citizens. This new, globally dominant orthodoxy in policymaking is closely tied to design-thinking which claims that digital technology addresses the dual crises of state capacity and public trust. Through an examination of virtual courts, this paper offers a critical analysis of the organising principles and the effects of the digital government revolution. It shows that virtual courts reconfigure the role of the public in 'seeing justice being done', leading to the emergence of a new 'visuality of technocracy'. However, it questions the claim that digital technology will transform public services and increase public trust. Creating new virtual spaces and interfaces is not a costless endeavour and, while it may make public services more convenient, it recasts citizens as passive viewers of justice and individual users of public services.

Governments around the world are building online infrastructures which they hope will become the main channels through which they interact with citizens. This new, globally dominant orthodoxy in policy-making is closely tied to design-thinking which claims that digital technology addresses the dual crises of state capacity and public trust. Through an examination of virtual courts, this paper offers a critical analysis of the organising principles and the effects of the digital government revolution. It shows that virtual courts reconfigure the role of the public in 'seeing justice being done', leading to the emergence of a new 'visuality of technocracy'. However, it questions the claim that digital technology will transform public services and increase public trust. Creating new virtual spaces and interfaces is not a costless endeavour and, whilst it may make public services more convenient, it recasts citizens as passive viewers of justice and individual users of public services.

Transparency has become the watchword of 21st-century liberal democracies. It refers to a project of opening up the state by providing online access to public sector data. This article puts forward a sociological critique of the transparency agenda and the purported relationship between institutional openness and public trust. Drawing upon Simmel's work, the article argues that open government initiatives routinely prize visibility over intelligibility and ignore the communicative basis of trust. The result is a non-reciprocal form of openness that obscures more than it reveals. In making this point the article suggests that transparency embodies the ethos of a now-discredited mode of what Ezrahi calls 'instrumental politics', reliant on the idea that the state constitutes a 'domain of plain public facts'. The article examines how alternative mechanisms for achieving government openness might better respond to the distinctive needs of citizens living in late modern societies.

Transparency has become the watchword of 21st-century liberal democracies. It refers to a project of opening up the state by providing online access to public sector data. This article puts forward a sociological critique of the transparency agenda and the purported relationship between institutional openness and public trust. Drawing upon Simmel's work, the article argues that open government initiatives routinely prize visibility over intelligibility and ignore the communicative basis of trust. The result is a non-reciprocal form of openness that obscures more than it reveals. In making this point the article suggests that transparency embodies the ethos of a now-discredited mode of what Ezrahi calls 'instrumental politics', reliant on the idea that the state constitutes a 'domain of plain public facts'. The article examines how alternative mechanisms for achieving government openness might better respond to the distinctive needs of citizens living in late modern societies.

The unusual condition of minority government of the 43rd Australian Parliament inspired reform to parliamentary procedures including the regulation of question time. This occurrence has reinvigorated debate about the purpose and effectiveness of the Westminster tradition of question time which was inherited by the Australian and New Zealand Parliaments alike. Mr. Malcolm Turnbull MP recently characterised question time as the 'most visible ritual' of the Australian Parliament. It is certainly the part of the Parliament's work which attracts the most media fascination and inspires the most public distaste with politics. Question time is now driven by dual objectives which this paper seeks to evaluate in the context of minority government. The historical objective of question time is the furthering of the ability of a parliament to hold the executive to account. The provision of an opportunity for private members to directly question Ministers of the government was intended to elicit detailed information about executive activity for parliament to scrutinise. Question time is also supposed to be a forum wherein any member of a parliamentary chamber may press the executive for action to remedy some exposed flaw of executive policy or actions. However, the success of question time as an accountability mechanism is weakened by the lack of an obligation upon ministers to answer and by the influence of party politics and party ties. The practical objective of question time for most politicians is political point scoring. In the contest of question time, individual parliamentarians seek to manifested in hostile questions, dismissive and evasive answers, and a focus on the 'headship' contest between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Some commentators fear that this political battle is superficial and overlooks the forensic roots of question time. Others note that the incentive of political parties to embarrass one another affords significant parliamentary scrutiny of mistakes and omissions which are exposed in the process. This paper investigates the impact of a government minority upon the success of question time as an accountability mechanism and on the potential for success of each side in question time politics. The presence of a government minority in a chamber appears to increase the extent to which the executive may be held to account. This is in line with the expectation that governments must work harder to negotiate with parties outside government when they do not have a secure hold on a voting majority. In contrast, little evidence is found to link the strength of the government's numbers with the political balance established in question time. This outcome is consistent with the understanding that question time is an open contest which may be won by any participant who can convince the press and public of his or her worth.