Sammendrag:

New Public Management (NPM) puts a major
emphasis on consumer sovereignty. Through
consumer sovereignty, it is argued, public
organizations will produce outputs more in
line with what citizens want. This article
analyses the implications, both theoretical
and practical, of conceiving of citizens as
customers. We discuss the features of
citizenship, the ways in which the emerging
customer focus impacts the role of citizen,
how consumerism would and, in implementation,
does work and the wider implications
for democratic governance, particularly the
effects on political and administrative leadership
roles and leaders’ political
accountability, of the tendency to define
citizens as customers of government agencies
when conceptualizing their relationship
to the state.