Britain’s ‘favoured response’ to crises: a critical review of existing literature on public inquiries

Public inquiries are a crucial part of British governance but academic reflections on them are fragmented, and existing scholarship is underappreciated within wider debates. In this review, I counteract this underappreciation and fragmentation by comprehensively organizing and critiquing this literature for the first time. I conceptualize inquiries literature as organized around the question of inquiry functionality, with inquiries considered either to provide accountability, or to serve the interests of the state. I then explore three limitations within this literature: (1) it often lacks a clear definition of the public inquiry; (2) both views of inquiry functionality are somewhat unconvincing (the first view takes inquiries at face value, while the latter adopts a problematic conception of state power); (3) the literature has methodological limitations which hamper attempts to generalize effectively about inquiries. This suggests that new research on inquiries should be clear in its definitional and sampling choices, engage with contemporary theoretical literature on the (British) state in order to conceptualize inquiry functionality more convincingly, and engage with primary data and novel methodological approaches over light single-case studies in order to establish a solid evidential basis on which to make general claims.