Institutional Sources of Citizens’ Trust in the Welfare State: A Literature Review

This article presents an integrative literature review that explores citizens’ trust in the welfare state, distinguishing this sub-field from broader research on political trust. The review aims to systematise the factors that shape the experiences of vulnerable welfare users with social policy and so contribute to their (dis)trust in welfare. The first part of the article compares various meanings of trust at different levels of welfare state organisation, from user trust in frontline services to trust in the welfare state as a whole. The ambiguities arising from different operationalisations of ‘trust in the welfare state’ are shown. The second part presents key factors that influence such trust, including prevailing redistributive principles, managerial pressures, institutions’ perceived performance, distributive and procedural justice, and characteristics of frontline workers. The article concludes by linking these factors into causal mechanisms that reveal the tensions users face between bureaucratic procedures and personal interactions with frontline workers.