Anne Daguerre has produced a valuable contribution to the debate on the causes and consequences of the shift towards increasingly ‘workfarist’ policies in the EU (the author is careful to distinguish such tendencies in European activation from the genuinely workfare-dominated model that defines US policy). The book delivers a series of absorbing case studies on policy processes explaining the rise of activation in the United States, the UK, Denmark and France, before turning to the background to, and influence of, the European Employment Strategy in EU states.

Daguerre's general thesis is that policy makers’ increasing focus on activation represents a shift towards conditionality, compulsion and a re-established distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. But the value of this book really lies in its exploration of how coalitions of individuals and interest groups have shaped reform trajectories. Drawing on interviews with high-level policy makers and civil servants, the four national empirical chapters offer detailed insights on how shared values and analyses, and the structure and strength of policy coalitions and issue networks, have impacted on approaches to activation. Daguerre first discusses the roots of the dominant workfare paradigm in the United States, tracing the emergence of supply-side theories informing the activation debate of the 1980s (from the underclass polemics of Mead and Murray, to more progressive ideas on the need to remove transitional barriers to work). She then suggests that the rise of New Democrat ‘Third Way’ thinking resulted in the disintegration of opposition to the Republican right's take on the causes of worklessness. The result was a cross-party coalition paving the way for a series of State-level waivers and Federal reforms that established a workfare state. Daguerre's critique of this attempt to ‘end welfare as we know it’ serves to highlight the differences between the immiserating, punitive workfare of the United States and all forms of activation as we know it in the EU. That said, she is highly critical of the UK's slide towards increasing compulsion first under the Conservatives’ stricter benefit regime and then New Labour's extensive activation programmes. The criticism here of New Labour's supposed obsession with ‘unemployment hidden as sickness’ is perhaps a little one-sided, given that there is ample evidence of the link between regional job loss and incapacity benefit claiming – evidence provided by respected labour market analysts as a means of demonstrating the need for demand-side interventions rather than as a justification for compulsory activation. Nevertheless, Daguerre paints a convincing picture of a supply-side agenda driven by shared beliefs within a stable policy coalition of civil servants, ‘Brownite’ special advisers and academics (with Richard Layard and colleagues prominent). She also accurately captures the conflicts within the UK government and policy agenda, which has seen schizophrenic attempts to combine ‘work first’ and ‘human capital’ approaches.

A chapter on Denmark traces the country's ‘rediscovery of activation’ from the mid-1990s, based on a belief shared across political parties in the ‘institutional truth’ (p. 88) that persistent unemployment was rooted in a lack of employability among the young and long-term workless. Denmark is often held up as a best case, combining rigorous activation with strong social protection and a human capital approach. But Daguerre offers important new evidence on an increasing sense of welfare chauvinism (stoked by the hard-right Danish Peoples Party) and related attacks on social assistance benefits and services that have followed since the election of a right-wing coalition in 2001. The absence of an intellectual consensus and consistent policy coalition around these values (with trade unions, the Social Democratic opposition and local authority professionals fighting a rear-guard action) has limited the damage. There is apparently even less of a ‘coherent policy agenda’ and consistent policy coalition in France, but Daguerre identifies a ‘logic of creeping activation’ here (p. 105). The acceptance within the ‘new left’ of certain aspects of right-wing discourses around welfare dependency and social exclusion has subtly altered the debate since 1997. But while a closed, tightly focused coalition of conservative ministers, advisers and civil servants are identified as producing the punitive Revenu minimum d'activité reform of 2004, Daguerre notes that its impact has been limited by a lack of support from social partners, civil society and the (especially Socialist-led) local authorities which are required to implement the programme. For Daguerre, right-wing governments have delivered a degree of welfare retrenchment, but France's statist, solidarity-oriented values have proved resilient – advocates of workfarist change are not backed ‘by a significant policy community capable of mobilising broader political support’ (p. 128).

The book's final empirical chapter critiques the European Employment Strategy's role in closing down the debate and reinforcing the logic of supply-side solutions, particularly in the 2000s when a shift to the right in many member state governments was reflected in a hardening of rhetoric from the European Commission. While previous reviews have caricatured the European Employment Strategy as an apologia for workfare, Daguerre presents a more nuanced discussion that exposes recent retreats from the promotion of a social dimension, but also acknowledges the Strategy's initial vision of human capital-oriented approaches complemented by neo-Keynesian development strategies. It is an argument typical of the balanced, intelligent and well-researched analysis that defines this book. Daguerre concludes that the characteristics of networks and coalitions can affect policy outcomes, but that exogenous political, ideological and economic shocks are also key to understanding changes in discourse and policy. The strengths of this book – its reporting of evidence gathered from those directly involved in the policy process, and its even-handed analysis of the outcomes achieved by policy communities and coalitions – make it a refreshing contribution, which offers important new insights into the politics of welfare reform.