Providing a new comparative analysis of the changes which have radically questioned the 'old' organizational arrangements of the delivery of welfare services since the early 1980s, this book argues that new managerial accountability regimes severely undermine the democratic foundations of the welfare state in Europe.

PAOLA MATTEI is Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim, Germany. She won the T.H.Marshall Fellowship at the London School of Economics for her research project on comparative welfare reforms in Europe, completed at the Transformations of the State Research Centre, Bremen, Germany and the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. She has published on comparative politics and public policy, including work on social administration and welfare state change.