ABSTRACT
Liberalisation, privatisation and marketisation not only had an impact on employment and working conditions but presumably also on consumer satisfaction. After all, politicians introduced the changes in the hope that they would lead to the provision of better services at lower prices. To assess the impact on consumers, a representative user survey was carried out in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Sweden and the UK in 2007–2008. One the one hand, the survey explored users’ satisfaction with the effects of liberalisation and privatisation; on the other, it explored the support for these policies. This chapter summarises the main results and discusses the findings in the light of the citizen-centred market approach of the European Commission. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of the role of service users in the European approach to public services, before we outline our main research questions. We then provide some technical details on the survey, its methodology and data analysis. The next section presents the main findings from the survey, followed by a brief discussion on possible conclusions.
