Dismantling Democratic States. By Ezra Suleiman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 368p. $39.50.

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.”