Citizens and consumers - An NPM dilemma

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.