Introduction to Themed Section – Trust and Distrust in Social Welfare: The Perspective of Users

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 such features become relevant in building political (dis)trust. They 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. The cases under comparison include five European countries – Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Poland, and Serbia. The volume’s contribution points to research avenues for examining how welfare users’ experiences matter in shaping their welfare and political attitudes.