Although citizenship may be affected directly by changing labour markets, this chapter concentrates on the unintended effects of policy change. New welfare policies may start as a mere effort to raise the efficiency of welfare production, in reaction to changing labour market conditions. However, we will show that these types of reform may have moral implications in the longer run.

The chapter focuses on the numerous reforms that have been implemented in the Dutch social security system. Often, welfare state reform is studied as a question of retrenchment. The central focus is then on the ways in which policy changes restrict the level of social protection. However, we find that actual welfare state changes (at least in the Netherlands) are not primarily a matter of more or less social rights. More important is a radical change in the institutional production of welfare, especially in the ways in which citizens, (private) organisations and state agencies are involved in the actual realisation of welfare. So we argue for an institutional approach to welfare state reform that concentrates on changes in the institutional logic of welfare production. We will discuss this approach in greater detail in the next section.

As the Dutch case demonstrates, many of the institutional reforms concern the issue of control. In order to discipline the behaviour of clients, firms and administrative agencies, organisational structures and policy programmes have been redesigned. In the third and fourth sections of this chapter we will present a detailed analysis of this process, as it has developed during the 1990s. It is shown that the ambition behind this process of change was to create a more efficient system of welfare production without damaging the level of social protection. Some authors have referred to this as an important element of ‘the Dutch miracle’ (this term was coined by Visser and Hemerijck (1997), who argued that the Dutch had learned how to fight unemployment while maintaining a reasonable level of social protection). However, whether this miracle has actually been realised remains to be seen.

Our analysis shows that the level of protection has largely remained in tact. However, this is only part of the story. As the institutional logic of welfare production has changed, new ideas on the social rights and duties of citizens have emerged.