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Commissions of inquiry play an important role in the aftermath of crisis, by serving as instruments of accountability and policy learning. Yet crises also involve a high-stake game of political survival, in which accountability and learning pose a serious threat to incumbent politicians. The political decision of whether to appoint a commission of inquiry after a crisis thus provides a unique prism for studying the intense conflict between politics, accountability and policy learning. Using data from the United Kingdom, this study develops and tests a choice model for this political decision. The results show that the political decision to appoint inquiries into public crises is strongly influenced by short-term blame avoidance considerations, media salience and government popularity.

English
The media salience trends of 40 events in the UK between 1984 and 2003 were examined to determine the validity of allegations regarding the agenda-setting effect of appointing public inquiries. Results show that, contrary to the 'long grass' argument, the attenuation in media salience following the appointment of a public inquiry is not different from that of non-inquired events. The findings are analysed and an alternative explanation is suggested for the prevalence of the 'long grass' argument.

A number of arguments regarding the politics of UK public inquiries (PIs) suggest that the appointment of a public inquiry and its subsequent report affect public responsibility attributions in ways that could be beneficial to the appointing office holder. One claim refers to the effect of an appointment on responsibility attribution towards the appointer of a PI; another refers to the relative strength of the effects of PI reports on responsibility attributions compared with other public evaluations. This latter argument relies on the assumption that PIs are judged as more credible than other conveyors of public evaluations. To test these hypotheses, this research employs two web‐based experiments involving a sample of 474 UK citizens. The findings do not support the hypotheses. Instead, they reveal that the credibility of PIs is conditional upon acceptability of the report content.

In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal-democratic values, when in fact they are compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal-democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of "is" from "ought." Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal-democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal-democratic settings.