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Reforming the Welfare State: Accountability, Management, and Performance

For many years there has been a growing concern that welfare states are inefficient, do not achieve their objectives, are not sustainable in financial terms, and are therefore losing popular support. A series of reforms have been introduced to address these challenges, many of them following some kind of new public management (NPM)-inspired reform trajectory. This entailed granting more autonomy to welfare agencies, transferring responsibilities to public managers, or even introducing some kind of market instruments and competition with private providers. The underlying idea, albeit mostly not very clearly expressed, was to enhance accountability and at the same time performance and legitimacy of welfare arrangements. But did this really happen? What are the intended and unintended outcomes of these reforms? The papers in this special issue tackle these questions by looking into reforms in important welfare sectors, especially labor market, health, and migration, in different European countries. The papers are the outcome of the Workshop on Administrative Organization and the Welfare State: Wicked Issues and the Challenges of Accountability, Legitimacy and Coordination at the ECPR Joint Sessions in Salamanca in April 2014. All but one of them were presented and discussed at this workshop. Most authors in this issue are furthermore part of a large comparative European project focusing on how contemporary reforms in core welfare state areas in Norway, Germany, and Denmark are affecting different accountability relationships (“Reforming the Welfare State. Democracy, Management and Accountability”). A main focus is on accountability to whom and how the trade-offs between political, administrative, managerial, legal, professional, and social accountability are changing in the areas of hospital management, welfare administration, and immigration. Our starting point was to understand how administrative reforms in the welfare state have affected the existing accountability relationship in welfare services (Lægreid & Mattei, 2013; Mattei, 2009). Traditionally these services had been delivered by public organizations in clearly defined hierarchical settings, but this is obviously no longer the case. Both NPM reforms oriented toward agencification, managerialism, and marketization as well as more recent so-called “whole-of-government” or post-NPM reforms, seeking to improve cooperation and collaboration across policy sectors and levels, have changed this. There is a lingering suspicion that these reforms in many areas have created confusion over who is accountable to whom for what and with what effects. Some claim accountability overload (Halachmi, 2014) while others point to accountability deficits (Mulgan, 2014a). To analyze these problems and to compare accountability relationships and especially developments across different policy fields and countries, we took as our starting point the well-known definition of the concept of accountability as suggested by Mark Bovens: