The distinctive character of the unemployment policies overhaul, known as the 'activation turn' of the 1990s, was that OECD governments intensified coercion against unemployed individuals while relaxing their commitment to ensuring full employment. By now supplyside activation policies have been tested long enough to permit conclusive evaluations, and the article surveys the body of empirical assessments to determine the achievements of the activation turn. The implementation of welfare-to-work policies has not resulted in bringing down the rates of unemployment (independently of the business cycle), combating long-term unemployment, reducing (in-work) poverty or empowering jobseekers as consumers of public services, which were all goals of the reformed 'activating state'. Instead, activation has been working as a mechanism of entrapment at the margins of liberalised labour markets by dint of its complementarity with employer-centred flexibility. The activation turn has thus failed to achieve its direct labour market and social objectives. However, it has produced pronounced indirect negative effects in the labour market, and its social impact has been regressive and repressive, as anticipated in normative and political-economic critiques of the rising 'workfare state'.

The paper aims to contribute to the normative debate concerning work enforcement in liberal democracies. In the late 1980s, OECD countries began to revert to the pre-welfare-state tradition of attributing unemployment to personal failure. The new welfare-to-work policies emphasised individual responsibility for securing employment. Stepping up job search requirements and sanctions for failure to meet them was presented as a public intervention that helps unemployed individuals return from dependency to autonomy. Jobseekers have been made to believe that success in obtaining employment depends on how doggedly they search for work and how adaptable they become to employer needs. These presumptions are challenged in the paper. Contracts that jobseekers are forced to sign with providers of employment services curtail their autonomy not only to the extent that they cannot avoid unproductive activity tests imposed on them, but also from a lifetime perspective in cases where they are forced into inferior jobs. In job-short economies, employers are also certain to discriminate against disadvantaged jobseekers notwithstanding the intensity of their effort or openness to occupational change.

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