Contemporary changes in European welfare states, together with social and political processes – rising security fears, democratic backsliding, growing political polarisation in Europe – have eroded citizens’ trust in both the welfare state and political systems. This is a relevant political problem, as institutional trust has been proven to be a much-needed resource. Trust in welfare institutions, and in a country’s political system, translates into acceptance of specific policies and more broadly into the system’s perceived legitimacy (Goubin and Kumlin, Reference Goubin and Kumlin2022). Users’ trust in frontline workers, in turn, has been proven necessary for the effective delivery of various social services and the stable functioning of welfare institutions (Fersch, Reference Fersch2016; Stensöta and Bendz, Reference Stensöta and Bendz2020). In social work, such trust also builds relationships with users (Rautio, Reference Rautio2013), enables clients to participate meaningfully (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Gallagher, Wosu, Stewart, Cree, Hunter, Evans, Montgomery, Holiday and Wilkinson2012), and aids in the disclosure of information about abuse (Cossar et al., Reference Cossar, Acheampong, Brandon, Boudier, Bailey, Fritz-Campbell, Belderson, Snape, Biggart, Thibou, Sharpe and Thrower2013).

The literature has identified a number of complex explanations for citizens’ trust or distrust in welfare state institutions. Proposed sources of trust in welfare state institutions include, inter alia: inclusiveness of universal welfare state regimes (Bugge, Reference Bugge2021; Betkó et al., Reference Betkó, Spierings and Gesthuizen2022), low administrative pressures on public employees (Brodkin, Reference Brodkin2011; van Ryzin, Reference Van Ryzin2011; Møller et al., Reference Møller and Stensöta2019), high perceived performance of institutions (Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Chen, Petrovsky and Walker2022), and various specific traits or practices of frontline workers, such as professional competences or clear communication with users (Björkhagen Turesson, Reference Björkhagen Turesson2020; Lundahl et al., Reference Lundahl, McDonald and Vanderloo2020; Wilson et al., Reference Wilson, Hean, Abebe and Heaslip2020; Tembo et al., Reference Tembo, Studsrød and Young2021). Simultaneously, welfare users’ features, in particular their socioeconomic standing and perceived own discrimination, have been proven to strongly affect trust in institutions (Bugge, Reference Bugge2021; Betkó et al., Reference Betkó, Spierings and Gesthuizen2022). Despite the abundance of research on sources of trust in welfare institutions (for an overview see Theiss and Szelewa, Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025 in this volume) and its effects on the welfare state’s functioning, there is still a need for a rigorous and focused analysis on how the policy experiences of welfare users contribute to political (dis)trust.

This themed section aims to contribute to our understanding of how users’ and citizens’ political (dis)trust comes about in the institutional context of social assistance. The section is focused on how welfare users experience various features of institutions when applying for and receiving social benefits and services, and how those features become relevant in building political (dis)trust. The following theoretical and methodological choices have shaped the perspective taken in this volume. First, the articles within the themed section deal with social assistance, representing the critical case (Flyvbjerg, Reference Flyvbjerg, Denzin and Lincoln2011) of circumstances in which it is essentially difficult to nurture political trust. In particular, the specific context of the conditionality of social welfare and a vulnerable position of the families throughout the process of application for assistance (and maintaining the right to benefits and services) makes the development of trust very difficult. Users’ vulnerability means here, above all, families’ need to use social assistance, either due to financial or care-related issues and simultaneous their various fears of welfare institutions, including the fear of children being removed to foster care (Lundahl et al., Reference Lundahl, McDonald and Vanderloo2020; Tembo et al., Reference Tembo, Studsrød and Young2021; Bugge, Reference Bugge2021; Betkó et al., Reference Betkó, Spierings and Gesthuizen2022). Therefore, the social assistance programmes represent the critical case, because if despite the unfavourable conditions it is still possible to nurture users’ trust, its development in other institutional contexts should be even more likely to happen. Second, the interpretive lens (Yanov, Reference Yanow2000) is applied in this volume to analyse relationships between the users’ experiences with welfare policy, their making sense of those experiences, and their attitudes of political (dis)trust or action-oriented decisions on whether to trust the given institution. Thus, the authors of the articles within the volume look at trust development as narrated by welfare users in relation to their own experiences with social assistance institutions. Third, the empirical articles in this themed section are rigorously comparative country-cases aimed at identifying broader patterns of trust-development.

How is social assistance a relevant sphere in which to analyse users’ and citizens’ trust? Social assistance includes the provision of in-kind benefits and services (Bahle and Wendt, Reference Bahle, Wendt, Beland, Morgan, Obinger and Pierson2021: 624) as well as social work at sites where face-to-face interactions between citizens and frontline workers occur. As mentioned, social assistance and social work within family services on which this themed section focuses is a policy field in which trust is crucial yet exceptionally difficult to achieve. Factors contributing to this difficulty include citizens’ general opinions about the quality of services, discrepancies in the way users and caseworkers understand needs (Buckley et al., Reference Buckley, Carr and Whelan2011), user stress (Wilson et al., Reference Wilson, Hean, Abebe and Heaslip2020), and fears of welfare agencies reporting to third parties or of children being removed to foster care (Lundahl et al., Reference Lundahl, McDonald and Vanderloo2020; Tembo et al., Reference Tembo, Studsrød and Young2021). Moreover, vulnerable citizens, particularly those reliant on social assistance, often exhibit markedly low levels of political trust and harbour a general distrust in the welfare system (Bugge, Reference Bugge2021; Betkó et al., Reference Betkó, Spierings and Gesthuizen2022). When it comes to developing trust at the individual level, social assistance and family services bear similarities to other social services, including those that address domestic abuse (Robbins and Cook, Reference Robbins and Cook2018), mental health services (Brown and Calnan, Reference Brown and Calnan2012), and integration policies for immigrants (Fersch, Reference Fersch2016).

This themed section expands our knowledge of the development of vulnerable users’ trust in welfare, which is shaped by two dominant streams of research. There are numerous studies on the relationship between citizens’ perceptions of what the welfare state delivers (in terms of institutional capacities, satisfactory welfare provision, fairness, etc.) and on trust as a type of political attitude (Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, Reference Kumlin and Haugsgjerd2017; Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Chen, Petrovsky and Walker2022). There are also qualitative studies focused on social assistance and social work that help us understand users’ interpersonal trust in social workers (Wilson et al., Reference Wilson and Ruch2008: 349; Robbins and Cook, Reference Robbins and Cook2018; Senghaas et al., Reference Senghaas, Freier and Kupka2019). At the confluence of these two streams of research, this themed section explores the relationship between vulnerable citizens’ agency in developing attitudes of trust or distrust towards the welfare state (its institutions) and the context within which this agency is performed. This context is analysed from welfare users’ subjective perspective: the term ‘developing (dis)trust’ is here understood as one aspect of the broader processes of users’ making sense of the welfare state (Yanov, Reference Yanow2000). The empirical articles collected in this volume show how subjectively perceived institutional features of the welfare state matter for the development of that trust. These features include institutional fragmentation, users’ notions of distributive justice, the organisation of contact with caseworkers, and national legacies of informal practices in welfare services. All empirical articles are based on individual in-depth interviews with welfare users reflecting on their policy experience and institutional and political trust.

This themed section moves beyond the state of the art by introducing a systemic comparative perspective. In contrast to most studies on users’ trust in the welfare system, which are single-case studies (e.g. Kohl et al., Reference Kohl, Amilon and Olsen2022; Sanfelici, Reference Sanfelici2023; Kvakic and Wærdahl, Reference Kvakic and Wærdahl2024), the empirical articles in this themed section are entirely based on comparative studies. The cases under comparison include five European countries – Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Serbia – each of which has its own unique combination of welfare regime, performance of democratic institutions, and political trust (in its various aspects). Thus, the case-selection complements existing analyses on the topic, which have often been focused on Nordic countries (e.g. Fersch, Reference Fersch2016; Møller and Stensöta, Reference Møller and Stensöta2019) or the UK (Brown and Calnan, Reference Brown and Calnan2012; Rautio, Reference Rautio2013; Robbins and Cook, Reference Robbins and Cook2018).

The literature review article that opens this themed section – Institutional Sources of Citizens’ Trust in the Welfare State: A literature review (Theiss and Szelewa, Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025) – lays the conceptual groundwork by specifying various types of trustees in research on trust in welfare, ranging from individual frontline workers, civil servants in general, through welfare institutions to the political system overall. This article also presents various sources of users’/citizens’ trust in welfare institutions, such as: welfare state regime, specific policy design, administrative pressures on frontline workers, modes of service implementation, perceptions of institutions’ effectiveness and their fairness, as well as frontline workers’ practices and features. Theiss and Szelewa propose that user trust is neither a fixed resource nor a mere byproduct of institutional design, but constitutes a dynamic relationship built on – or eroded – through citizens’ interactions with frontline institutions, bureaucratic procedures, and service providers.

Each of the four empirical articles in this themed section deals with specific features of the institutional and country contexts that are relevant for developing vulnerable families’ trust in welfare institutions. Ulrike Zschache and coauthors (Zschache et al., Reference Zschache, Schneider, Brus and Trenz2025), in their contribution The Conditionality of Trusting Caseworkers in the Social Services Sector – Insights from Germany and Denmark, compare welfare beneficiaries’ experiences in Germany and Denmark to analyse how the strong structural asymmetries between case workers and welfare users (e.g. caused by eligibility checks) become relevant for individual trust development in high-trust countries. The authors show that a shared problem definition held in common by users and case workers as well as the caseworkers’ conviction that users are in need, together with positive experiences of cooperation and good emotions, forge a path to developing user trust.

In the second empirical article – Citizen Among Institutions: Fragmentation and Trust in Social Assistance by Stephanie Schneider and coauthors (Schneider et al., Reference Schneider, Theiss, Gędek and Zschache2025) – the relevance of the welfare system’s horizontal fragmentation is analysed using the example of Germany and Poland. The authors find that higher fragmentation in Germany is an unfavourable context for the development of user trust. What is distinctive for the German case, is that the applicants entering the system are confused about ‘where to go’ when seeking help. Beyond that, fragmentation as experienced by users is ubiquitous in both countries. On the one hand, the authors identify potentially negative impacts of institutional fragmentation on trust due to administrative burden and the feeling of injustice that users report. On the other hand, the fragmentation also appeared to foster user trust at the individual level of relationships between client and caseworker, as caseworkers tend to be appreciated for being helpful in navigating in a very complex system.

The article comparing Czechia and Poland – Welfare Users’ Perceptions of Distributive Justice and Trust When Facing Institutional Enigma (Theiss et al., Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025) – analyses how the highly hybrid social assistance system, perceived by users as a self-contradictory and somewhat unpredictable ‘institutional enigma’, becomes a context adverse to nurturing beneficiaries’ trust in the system. The authors show that in such a context there are trusting users who perceive systems as fair, are well informed, and value systems’ rational decisions. At the same time, other users, though, find the system unjust, cruel, and ill-targeted to groups they perceive as undeserving. Although the relationship between trust in welfare institutions and fairness perceptions appears to be bi-directional, the authors show how some users’ experience of surprise at being granted or denied help causes them to develop (dis)trust in social assistance.

The article The Role of Bureaucratic Procedures and ‘Caring Professionals’ in Fostering User Trust: Evidence from Serbia and Czech Republic by Jelena Vasiljević and her colleagues (Vasiljević et al., Reference Vasiljević, Fiket, Đorđević and Štěpánková2025) focuses on two post-socialist countries, Czechia and Serbia. Authors show how in the countries with low levels of institutional trust welfare, users are prone to be sympathetic with frontline workers and assume that it is ‘the system’ that restricts case workers from expressing greater interest or initiative. In consequence, an equilibrium develops of user trust in frontline workers, but not in the institutions.

Overall, the research articles collected in this themed section contribute to the field with at least three cross-cutting findings. First, they demonstrate that in the trust-unfavourable context of social assistance provided to vulnerable families, user trust can still be nurtured. From previous research we know that frontline workers’ perceived morality, good communication, effective delivery of services, etc., contribute to that trust (van Ryzin, Reference Van Ryzin2011; Björkhagen Turesson, Reference Björkhagen Turesson2020; Lundahl et al., Reference Lundahl, McDonald and Vanderloo2020; Wilson et al., Reference Wilson, Hean, Abebe and Heaslip2020; Tembo et al., Reference Tembo, Studsrød and Young2021). The articles in this themed section show that the development of a shared understanding of a client’s problem between caseworker and user, and the surprising experience of receiving welfare, can facilitate user trust. Moreover, the adverse institutional context may paradoxically foster trust in frontline workers, as in the context of highly fragmented systems that need to be ‘translated’ by caseworkers. In a similar fashion, in the conditions of low political trust, the users tend to develop a sympathetic stance towards caseworkers and the appreciation of the caseworkers’ efforts, given the challenging situation the system puts them in.

Secondly, the articles within this volume demonstrate that in the context in which citizens have encounters with frontline workers, institutional trust is in fact a multilayered amalgamate. Namely, both the sources and the targets of trust work simultaneously at two levels, between which synergies may occur. Citizens face the formal and abstract functioning of institutions when they experience applying for welfare, following the rules, procedures, and institutional structures. Simultaneously, they have the contacts with frontline workers who are personal and often create bond, reciprocity, and emotions. The empirical studies here show that in some instances users clearly differentiate between the caseworkers and the system they are functioning in. In other cases, the borders between those organisational levels are blurred, as people often speak of ‘them’ in reference to both frontline workers and the (abstract) system. Moreover, as noted, there can be trade-offs in beneficiaries’ trust in both these targets, due to the crowding-in mechanism of personal trust in caseworkers. Finally, we would like to note that upscaling of trust from individual to the systemic level hardly ever takes place.

Third, the studies here also unveil the existence of another dimension of trust in institutions that may have different features, beyond political trust known to be a relatively stable individual disposition (Citrin and Stoker, Reference Citrin and Stoker2018; Devine and Valgarðsson, Reference Devine and Valgarðsson2024). At least in the case of vulnerable citizens, such as families making use of social assistance, that aspect of trust in institutions is based on constant cognitive and emotional work on reinterpreting various, often contradictory experiences with those institutions. As the articles in this themed section show, welfare users proactively decide to give frontline workers credit of trust, as found in the Czech case (Vasiljević et al., Reference Vasiljević, Fiket, Đorđević and Štěpánková2025), they may acknowledge the institutional context and thus be sympathetic with frontline workers, as shown by the case of Serbian users (Vasiljević et al., Reference Vasiljević, Fiket, Đorđević and Štěpánková2025), or they may appreciate the caseworkers’ help in navigating through the fragmented system, as presented in the German case (Schneider et al., Reference Schneider, Theiss, Gędek and Zschache2025). The citizens may also build their trust through accumulating knowledge of how the system works or revise their attitude after experiencing a significant surprise from the system, as presented in the case of Poland (Theiss et al., Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025). These examples show that beneath the attitude of (dis)trust in the political system in general, there in fact lies ongoing work on the part of users and citizens on reinterpreting their own experiences with the welfare state. Most generally, this volume is intended to contribute to broadening our knowledge of which contexts and which experiences are relevant for changes in that trust. Simultaneously, the volume’s contribution points to research avenues for examining how welfare users’ experiences matter in shaping their welfare and political attitudes.