Introducing choice and competition in public services was supposed to put citizens in the “driver's seat”, making them in charge of their service provision. Introducing choice often is indeed beneficial for citizens. However, it sometimes also leads to increased inequality among citizens....

Public organizations account for their performance through making public sector performance information publicly available, both to politicians through performance reporting, and to citizens through rankings, websites, and performance reports. This chapter reviews whether performance reporting...

The introduction of choice in public services, and in health services more specifically, is part of a wider movement to introduce consumerism in health care. In this article, we analyze how citizens perceive the availability of choice of primary care doctors in 22 European countries, and what...

Background Effective health system reform requires support from health care professionals. However, many studies show an increasing discontent among health care professionals toward certain government policies. When professionals resist implementing policies, this may have serious consequences...

Citizens consider certain public (and private) services as essential services and therefore to be shielded from the full extent of market forces. Little is known about why some services are considered essential public services while other sometimes very similar services are not. In this article,...

When the word ‘bureaucrat’ is used, it often bears no relation to the concept of ‘bureaucracy’ as an efficient way of organizing an administration, as it does in Max Weber’s writings (Weber, 1922). Even ‘civil servant’ carries a negative connotation. Civil servants are lazy and...

The chapters in this book have all in some way focused on new steering instruments in the public sector, or on how governments, often in collaboration with other actors, attempt to achieve integrated results and broad social outcomes. The trend away from the traditional and NPM-style...

Multifaceted issues such as safety, social inclusion, poverty, mobility, rural development, city regeneration or labour market integration require integrated approaches in their steering. Governments are looking for instruments that can address the boundary-spanning nature of many social...

We use data from the World Values Survey to describe and compare levels of confidence in the civil service in a series of countries, and study determinants of this confidence. Instead of focusing on citizen satisfaction with specific public services in a specific country, we analyze citizens’...