ABSTRACT
Scrutiny of the state, in the sense of critical examination and questioning, is seen as vital to a healthy democracy. Anthropologists point to the blurring and entanglement between the state and other parts of society, as well as other states. The state is not the discrete system sometimes portrayed by political scientists or policy / public administration scholars: it is entangled, dynamic and unpredictable. This chapter offers two narratives on evidence and conflict in processes of scrutiny. The contestability of evidence is far more complex than the articulation of interests in straight lines. Different groups of people in society produce truth and knowledge, and therefore what they see as ‘evidence’, in different ways so people argue about what is reliable as much as they disagree with the substance. The chapter considers the shadowing of parliament by the media, and how and why scrutiny can tip over into attack, before deriving general observations from these two cases of scrutiny.
