Market-driven administrative reform has been the leitmotif of profound, perhaps even unprecedented, public sector reform across the Western world for the past decade or so. It is indicative that even in Sweden (the place of writing), a country that has been fairly slow in adopting this model of administrative reform, authorities such as the Migration Board and the Prison and Probation Board nowadays define their clients as “customers.”

There is today a host of literature on this type of administrative reform. Usually referred to as new public management (NPM), “reinventing government,” or public management reform, the basic tenets of reform have been to introduce markets in the public sector, allow for “customer” choice among service providers, privatize and/or contract out service production, deregulate, introduce purchaser/provider arrangements that remove elected officials from operative responsibilities, decentralize, and—not least importantly—implement powerful cutbacks in the bureaucracy's budget. As a result, Western democracies have seen massive layoffs in the public bureaucracy. This type of administrative reform would not have been possible without strong normative and ideological support. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration in the United States and the Thatcher government in the U.K.—followed by political leaders of similar ideological persuasion in countries like Australia and Canada—launched campaigns of bureaucracy bashing without realizing that in doing so, they pulled the carpet from under their own feet, according to Ezra Suleiman.

We already know a great deal about these reforms. Suleiman's purpose with this book is not so much to present those reforms as it is to ask what all this means and what the consequences of this reform strategy have been. Thus, this book invites a critique of new public management and related strategies of reinventing government from a new vantage point. True, other observers of administrative reform, such as George Frederickson, Donald Savoie, Guy Peters, and the late Peter Self, have raised similar questions, but Suleiman's analysis is original in that it evaluates this reform against the backdrop of government legitimacy and the impact of reform on democratic governance. As such, it offers a powerful blow to the advocates of market-based administrative reform and a welcome antidote to the sometimes rather naive accounts of the blessings of introducing markets into the public sector

Suleiman argues that this model of reforming the public administration has ramifications far beyond the bureaucracy itself; it is a matter of tampering with one of the basic foundations of democratic government. In implementing NPM reforms, “democratic societies have been following a path that leads to undermining, or even destroying, one of the central institutions on which a democratic polity depends” (p. 18). Democratic government requires a capable, professional, and nonpoliticized executive branch, and recent administrative reform has reduced the capabilities of the public administration, as well as deprofessionalized and politicized it. Given these developments and the overall neoliberal attack on government in the political debate, small wonder that citizens are becoming increasingly cynical and distrustful of the public bureaucracy: “Democratic societies are based on legitimacy, which itself is largely based on effectiveness. How can governments preserve their legitimacy if they deny themselves the means of being effective?” (p. 2).

The book draws on a comparative analysis of administrative reform. Such countries as the United States, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand have implemented NPM most extensively. Other countries, such as France, Japan, and to some extent, Germany, have been more reluctant to embark on market-based reform. Suleiman argues that particularly in these countries, there is a stronger notion of the public interest compared to the Anglo-American democracies. The book offers a detailed analysis of the types of administrative reform that have been implemented in the different countries.

Perhaps more than anything else, Suleiman takes up arms against the notion in NPM that management is basically a generic phenomenon and that the specificity of the public sector is exaggerated. Market-based reform has confused and blurred the public interest and reduced the public space in society. The fad to transform citizens into customers, just to give an example, has driven these unfortunate developments. “Customers are not a collectivity,” Suleiman reminds us (p. 55), and this reform tends to disaggregate the polity.

The list of important observations and arguments advanced in the book could be much longer. Suffice it to say that Dismantling Democratic Societies articulates a systematic critique of recent administrative reform, which raises questions that should have been raised already when the reforms were deliberated and implemented. This is an excellent contribution to the debate on administrative reform.

All of that having been said, Suleiman's crusade against contemporary administrative reform and its advocates is not without collateral damage. His all-out attack on NPM does not take into account that there are elements in NPM reform that clearly empower the citizen/consumer vis-à-vis the bureaucracy, such as the option to choose among different service providers or a more customer-attuned public service. Similarly, for all its flaws and problems, NPM could be a strategy to increase the effectiveness of the public bureaucracy, something which, according to Suleiman (inspired by Seymour Lipset), would yield stronger legitimacy. Increased efficiency and effectiveness is probably the one reform objective that the NPM advocates can present with some credibility. While the author certainly is not an opponent of public administration change, increasing efficiency would in fact ameliorate some of the problems he identifies in current administrative reform.

Secondly, as always, there is the devil in the detail. Suleiman's treatment of Sweden is not very clear. At one place (p. 66), Sweden is said to have implemented NPM reforms “extensively”; later, however, Sweden is reported to have a reform strategy that “is similar to Germany's in that it focuses on experimentation and remains highly selective in the parts of the NPM agenda that it promotes” (p. 141). This latter analysis is more correct than the former.

These are details that must not obscure the overall excellent qualities of the book. It marks a welcome contribution to the debate on the contemporary state and administrative reform.