Over the past decade, many European countries have undertaken reforms aiming at better co-ordinating and integrating their social security systems for working-age people. Those reforms have usually gone hand in hand with a reorientation of welfare states towards activation, and they have often been justified in terms of improving employment support for benefit claimants previously considered as inactive, while providing more efficient and customer-friendly services. However, empirical evidence shows that radical ‘coordination initiatives’ such as mergers of agencies or the creation of one-stop-shops have sometimes been very tricky to implement, while their short-term gains in terms of efficiency and labour market integration have remained modest. This brings up the question of the reasons why governments did embark on such organisational reforms. Starting from that research question, the objective of this paper is twofold: first, it aims to present a conceptual model of the adoption of coordination initiatives focussing on governments’ various interests and objectives. The main argument is the following: if governments decided at some point in time to engage in a radical coordination initiative, this is not only because of their willingness to strengthen activation policies, but also because they saw in them an opportunity to pursue electoral goals or redefine the ways responsibilities for social security are shared between the central state and other actors. Second, it tries to illustrate this conceptual argument by retracing the policy-making processes leading to the adoption of radical coordination initiatives in two countries: the United Kingdom with the setting up of Jobcentre Plus in 2002, and Germany with the 2005 Hartz IV reform.
