Introduction
In recent decades, citizen trust in public institutions has become a major concern for policy makers due to its relevance for questions of legitimacy, social cohesion, and democratic participation. However, our knowledge about how welfare state institutions themselves contribute to citizens’ trust in them is unevenly focused. Relatively well-researched topics include how welfare state regimes and social policy design impact citizens’ social capital and generalised trust (Putnam, Reference Putnam2000; Rothstein and Stolle, Reference Rothstein, Stolle, Hooghe and Stolle2003; Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, Reference Kumlin, Haugsgjerd, Zmerli and van der Meer2017) and how frontline workers’ practices and styles of work impact welfare users’ institutional trust (van Ryzin, Reference van Ryzin2011; Fersch, Reference Fersch2016). Against this backdrop, the relevance of organisational aspects of welfare delivery remains rather under-investigated. A lacuna in our knowledge concerns the question of how horizontal fragmentation as perceived by welfare users – that is, the experience of having to do with many institutions in the same policy field – impacts their (dis)trust in the institutions of the welfare system. Various strands of research suggest that horizontal institutional fragmentation is trust-relevant, but that mixed mechanisms are at play. In the policy integration literature, there is an extensive debate on whether overcoming fragmentation and establishing one-stop shops is beneficial for clients (Askim et al., Reference Askim, Fimreite, Moseley and Pedersen2011; European Commission, 2014; Minas, Reference Minas2014) and increases their trust in the welfare system. On the one hand, a high level of institutional fragmentation causes a stronger focus of institutions on ‘typical cases’, and more frequent referrals and higher administrative burdens for users. On the other hand, institutional specialisation and decoupling may in fact be trust-beneficial through increased efficiency in the provision of services (Nordesjö, Reference Nordesjö2020), since a perceived improvement in performance has been shown to contribute to trust formation (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Li and Yang2022). Apart from such scattered indications, the existing scholarship has mostly enhanced our understanding of how frontline workers perceive fragmentation and how inter-institutional trust may improve coordination (Christensen and Lægreid, Reference Christensen and Lægreid2013; Christensen et al., Reference Christensen, Lægreid and Lægreid2019), but we know little about what is meaningful to users in this regard. Given that direct encounters with institutions are of critical importance for the formation of users’ institutional (dis)trust, the question of whether they perceive these institutions as fragmented merits further attention. Focusing on the meso-level of institutional design promises insights that can complement and complicate existing findings on the links between institutional trust and the macro-level of welfare regimes or the micro-level of citizens’ or frontline workers’ attributes.
Based on interviews with social assistance users in Germany and Poland, we investigate how welfare users experience institutional fragmentation and its coordination, how they make sense of it and, above all, how these experiences relate to the formation of (dis)trust in welfare state institutions. We focus on horizontal fragmentation since, from a user’s perspective, this forms a more tangible part of their experiences with welfare institutions than vertical fragmentation. We regard trust in (welfare) institutions as an aspect of institutional trust and the overarching category, that is political trust (Theiss and Szelewa, Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025). In line with previous studies, we acknowledge that this trust is complex, can operate at various levels of state organisation simultaneously (Jessen, Reference Jessen2010) and that lines between those levels may seem blurred for citizens (van de Walle and Bouckaert, Reference van de Walle and Bouckaert2003).
Since the literature points to potentially conflicting mechanisms at work in linking horizontal fragmentation and institutional trust, we seek to elucidate if and how ‘having to deal with many institutions’ when claiming welfare benefits shapes the circumstances under which welfare users develop (dis)trust in welfare institutions. Although fragmentation is certainly relevant for the perceived legitimacy of institutions and for trust-development in the population at large, we are particularly interested in the relational aspects of face-to-face encounters between users and frontline workers as ‘“access points” to abstract systems’ (Fersch Reference Fersch2016: 1; also see Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, Reference Kumlin, Haugsgjerd, Zmerli and van der Meer2017; Theiss and Szelewa, Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025). Empirically, we focus on the field of social assistance for vulnerable families with dependent children and their experiences with applying for financial support in the German and Polish social assistance systems – a policy field where trust is typically difficult to achieve (EnTrust, 2021; Hansen, Reference Hansen2025). Both welfare systems may be considered fragmented (Kazepov and Barberis, Reference Kazepov, Barberis, Marx and Nelson2013; Mandes, Reference Mandes, Heidenreich and Rice2016), but horizontal fragmentation is of much greater significance in the German system, mostly due to the dominance of the principle of subsidiarity and the pronounced legal differentiation into different areas of social assistance. Since fragmentation is relevant in both countries, but in different ways and to differing degrees, this choice of countries allows us to assess the empirical relevance of the links between horizontal fragmentation and institutional trust proposed in the literature from the perspective of users.
The article is structured as follows: we first provide an overview of the literature on institutional fragmentation and trust and situate our interest in horizontal fragmentation in the broader debates around street-level bureaucracies, administrative burden, and institutional integration or coordination. Based on the literature on the trust-performance link and on distributive and procedural justice, we identify the mechanisms by which we expect horizontal fragmentation and users’ institutional trust to be linked. We then present our data and methods. In the section that follows, we provide contextual information on the degree of formal institutional fragmentation of the Polish and German social assistance systems. In our presentation of findings, we show that users’ experiences of fragmentation encompass more than the narrow social-science understanding of fragmentation, and that this experiential context is an important factor concerning both the relevance that interviewees attach to trust-issues and the specific forms of trust involved. In particular, we demonstrate that fragmentation can be detrimental for institutional trust, but conducive to interpersonal trust. In the concluding section, we summarise our findings, discuss their implications for conceptualising the link between fragmentation and trust, and point to avenues for future research.
Horizontal institutional fragmentation and trust
In the last decades, debates around trust in public institutions, its relevance, and possible reasons for its decline, have gained prominence (Norris, Reference Norris2022). Scholars are unanimous that, in general terms, the design of institutions and their legacy affect trust, leading to persistent trust or distrust equilibria in different settings (Putnam, Reference Putnam2000). A subject of continued discussion has been whether trust as a social norm may be crowded out by an excessive bureaucratisation of institutions, due to possible trade-offs between formal rules of regulation and informal trust (Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1995: 224; Putnam, Reference Putnam2000) or whether generous welfare states may indeed contribute to social capital and generalised trust (Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005). Beyond the impact of welfare state size and the redistributive principles embedded in welfare policies on social and political trust, there is now a growing interest in how the organisational aspects of welfare state and social services contribute to trust in public institutions (Rothstein and Stolle, Reference Rothstein, Stolle, Hooghe and Stolle2003; Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005; Kumlin and Haugsgjerd, Reference Kumlin, Haugsgjerd, Zmerli and van der Meer2017). Yet, there are only a few studies (Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020; Berg and Johansson, Reference Berg and Johansson2020) directly investigating the impact of horizontal fragmentation and different modes of service provision on users’ institutional trust. Even less is known about the specific impact of horizontal fragmentation of public service providers from a cross-national perspective. Indications for the relationship between horizontal fragmentation and users’ institutional trust can only indirectly be derived from those literature streams that separately discuss how institutional fragmentation impacts users, on the one hand, and what institutional trust is contingent upon, on the other hand.
In the scholarly literature, institutional fragmentation is used to describe internal divisions present in the public sector (Champion and Bonoli, Reference Champion and Bonoli2011). This can refer to the vertical fragmentation of institutions, including the managerial division of labour within offices and the overall institutional hierarchies within a country (Christensen and Lægreid, Reference Christensen and Lægreid2013; Goodman, Reference Goodman2019), and to horizontal fragmentation in the form of outsourcing of services to private service providers (Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020; Berg and Johansson, Reference Berg and Johansson2020), intersectoral cooperation between institutions (Bakken and van der Wel, Reference Bakken and van der Wel2022) or the presence of multiple public agencies with responsibilities in the same policy field (Cejudo and Michel, Reference Cejudo and Michel2017; Trein and Ansell, Reference Trein and Ansell2021). In contrast to vertical fragmentation, horizontal fragmentation is directly observable for users – for example, through the number of distinct units they encounter in a local government system (Boyne, Reference Boyne1992; Goodman, Reference Goodman2019). Given our focus on personal experiences with public institutions that take decisions relevant for individual users, vertical fragmentation is beyond the scope of this study.Footnote 1
Three strands of research shed light on the potential problems that users encounter in fragmented institutional settings. First, street-level bureaucracy literature shows that the presence of a variety of public institutions in a given policy field is associated with practices of client selection and referrals (Lipsky, Reference Lipsky2010; Gui et al., Reference Gui, Chen and Pine2018), including ‘ritualistic’ offerings of outsourced measures (Gjersøe, Reference Gjersøe2021). In practice, these imply poor accessibility and a low responsiveness to clients’ needs. The need to contact different institutions to claim benefits is found to be particularly difficult to navigate for clients with complex needs and multiple disadvantages (Minas, Reference Minas2014; Matscheck et al., Reference Matscheck, Piuva, Eriksson and Åberg2019; Grell, Reference Grell2022). Also, ‘rubber stamping’, or the passing of adverse information about clients between institutions, is found to be more prevalent in fragmented institutional contexts (Lipsky, Reference Lipsky2010: 129; van Berkel and Knies, Reference van Berkel and Knies2016). In addition, fragmentation may lead to briefer and more superficial relationships with clients in social work and social care (Carey, Reference Carey2015).
Secondly, the literature on administrative burden (Burden et al., Reference Burden, Canon, Mayer and Moynihan2012; Moynihan et al., Reference Moynihan, Herd and Harvey2015) indicates further potential consequences of fragmented institutional contexts. Learning costs are compounded by citizens’ need to collect information on particular services, responsibilities, and entitlements, whilst compliance costs are driven higher by application requirements and discretionary demands to be fulfilled repeatedly in different places. For vulnerable groups, in particular, fragmentation can entail heightened psychological costs due to repeated and cumulative experiences of stress, loss of autonomy, and stigma (Moynihan et al., Reference Moynihan, Herd and Harvey2015; Baekgaard and Tankink, Reference Baekgaard and Tankink2022).
Thirdly, social services and social work organisation literature clearly shows the detrimental effects of institutional fragmentation on welfare users. In order to overcome the above-mentioned problems, various solutions focused at institutional integration, coordination, avoidance of silos, or organising one-stop shops have been introduced, also with the goal of improving trust among the actors involved (Christensen and Lægreid, Reference Christensen and Lægreid2013; Minas, Reference Minas2014; Gjersøe, Reference Gjersøe2016; Cejudo and Michel, Reference Cejudo and Michel2017; Gui et al., Reference Gui, Chen and Pine2018).
The problems recognised in the literature on institutional fragmentation relate to important mechanisms leading to users’ (dis)trust in institutions. Those mechanisms include the role of the perceived performance of institutions. Studies show that institutional outputs and outcomes, as perceived by citizens, and citizens’ satisfaction with the quality of services affect political trust, including institutional trust (van Ryzin, Reference van Ryzin2011; Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Li and Yang2022). Research in this area also underscores the role of perceived distributive (Kluegel and Mason, Reference Kluegel and Mason2004; Kumlin, Reference Kumlin2004; Zmerli and Castillo, Reference Zmerli and Castillo2015; Bobzien, Reference Bobzien2023) and procedural (Tyler, Reference Tyler and Sarat2004; van Ryzin, Reference van Ryzin2011; Rautio, Reference Rautio2013; Abdelzadeh et al., Reference Abdelzadeh, Zetterberg and Ekman2015; Schnaudt et al., Reference Schnaudt, Hahn and Heppner2021) justice for trust in institutions. Institutional trust constitutes an aspect of political trust and as such is an impersonal form of trust (Kim, Reference Kim2005). However, in the case of such institutions as social assistance where users encounter frontline workers on a daily basis, that trust may be intertwined with individual-level relations of (dis)trust with frontline workers. While the latter could be regarded as representatives of the state (Fersch, Reference Fersch2016; Zacka, Reference Zacka2017), the literature on frontline workers’ style of work shows that its impact on how users perceive and (dis)trust institutions is not that clear-cut. In fact, since frontline workers may bend or break formal rules in favour of citizens (Davidovitz and Cohen, Reference Davidovitz and Cohen2022), users often distinguish between trust in the system and trust in the caseworker (Senghaas et al., Reference Senghaas, Freier and Kupka2019). This points to the need to disentangle the different forms, levels, and objects of trust and the respective mechanisms involved.
Data and methods
In the context of the EnTrust-research project, qualitative studies on the role of trust in interactions between frontline workers and service users were carried out in seven different countries across Europe [EnTrust, 2021].Footnote 2 To avoid some of the pitfalls of methodological nationalism where internal heterogeneities and differences between policy fields might in fact outweigh the importance of national context (Ciccia and Javornik, Reference Ciccia and Javornik2019: 2), we focused on one policy area, namely social security provision for vulnerable families, and on one level of the policy process, namely policy implementation in street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky, Reference Lipsky2010). The choice of the policy field of social assistance was motivated by the desire to focus on an area where direct encounters between citizens and frontline workers form a regular occurrence rather than an exception (as, e.g., in the policy field of taxation) and where questions of trust are particularly salient (e.g., due to the prevalence of means-testing). For the present article, we selected Germany and Poland as most dissimilar cases concerning their level of horizontal fragmentation and aimed at a comparative analysis of users’ experiences with claiming assistance in the same policy field. Our analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with adult social assistance beneficiaries with dependent children at different locations in Poland (eighteen interviews) and Germany (twenty-five interviews).Footnote 3 In methodological terms, this sampling decision means selecting an ‘extreme case’ (Flyvbjerg, Reference Flyvbjerg2006) in which trust in the state and its institutions is difficult to achieve (Newton et al., Reference Newton, Stolle, Zmerli and Uslaner2018: 47–48; EnTrust, 2021: 4). Furthermore, and in contrast to citizens who have never applied for social assistance, our interviewees have unique access to experiences with horizontal fragmentation in public social service provision and, due to the complexity of their problems, are in particular need of integrated service delivery (Minas, Reference Minas2016). Although our sample is limited in that fragmentation is certainly relevant for trust formation in the population at large, this narrow focus on vulnerable families in comparable life circumstances but in differently fragmented contexts allows us to study closely whether and how direct experiences of horizontal fragmentation are related to the formation of users’ institutional trust and distrust.
Next to questions concerning users’ experiences with applying for benefits and services and their encounters with frontline workers, our interview guide contained a section in which interviewees were explicitly asked to elaborate on their understanding of trust in general, and in terms of their relation to social services and individual frontline workers in particular. For all interview transcripts, inductive open coding and selective coding based on a common, integrated coding scheme had already been carried out for the purposes of the EnTrust-report on ‘Trust and Distrust at the Street-Level of Public Policy’ (EnTrust, 2021). On the basis of this existing coding, we selected interview passages that contained narrations of interviewees’ experiences regarding the need to contact institutions and a mention of (dis)trust for a detailed secondary analysis.
Since the main goals of this article are strongly related to the relational and street-level aspects of social services provision, in our empirical analysis we explicitly focus on fragmentation understood in terms of lack of coordination or dispersion of local institutions as perceived by social assistance users and leave aside issues of vertical fragmentation (such as institutional hierarchies or managerial division of labour within offices) that may be important for adequate service provision but that are not experienced as fragmentation by users. As discussed above, the existing literature suggests that horizontal fragmentation may be detrimental to trust in welfare institutions and, more broadly, the political system, but also contains elements potentially conducive to trust-building. By focusing on user accounts, we attempted to understand more deeply whether and how a perceived horizontal fragmentation is relevant for the formation of (dis)trust in institutions. More specifically, we tried to answer the following questions:
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1) How do interviewees understand and experience horizontal institutional fragmentation of the social assistance system?
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2) How do experiences and perceptions differ between Germany (the more fragmented system) and Poland, and where can we discern commonalities?
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3) Do interviewees draw implicit or explicit connections between experiences of ‘having to deal with many institutions’ and trust?
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4) What relationships between fragmentation and trust can be reconstructed from the data?
Our focus on citizens’ experiences of fragmentation and trust means we accept that reflections shared by our interviewees may not strictly follow academic definitions of these concepts. As specified further below, the way citizens perceive ‘moving among many welfare institutions’ does not always reflect the scientific term of horizontal fragmentation. And in citizens’ lived experience, the academic distinction between different forms and objects of trust also happens to be blurred. Interviewees speak, for example, of ‘(not) trusting them’ or ‘those caseworkers’ or ‘assistance centre and people working there’. In the process of data analysis, we carefully interpreted these passages in their larger context to ascertain whether interviewees were referring to interpersonal trust in individual caseworkers or to impersonal forms of trust in the institutions of social assistance. Furthermore, references to trust sometimes remained implicit or were even completely absent when interviewees spoke about their experiences of ‘moving among many institutions’. Since such silences in the data were particularly pronounced in the less fragmented Polish case, they constitute an interesting finding in its own right. As will become obvious below, the experiential context of fragmentation, including but going beyond formal horizontal fragmentation, forms an important background to the relevance that interviewees attach to questions concerning both institutional trust and interpersonal trust. But before moving on to present our findings, and to enable contextualisation, we will first provide a brief overview of fragmentation in formal terms in the two countries.
The fragmentation of the social assistance system in Germany and Poland
The German welfare system shares important characteristics of the conservative-corporatist model of welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen, Reference Esping-Andersen1990) and has traditionally been strongly segmented both vertically and horizontally (Brettschneider, Reference Brettschneider2019). Vertical fragmentation is rooted in the country’s tradition of federalism and the principle of subsidiarity, involving the notion of an obligation to self-help, the primacy of the lowest level as well as non-public over the public institutions of welfare. In fact, it is largely the municipalities or the local level entities, not the federal or regional governments, that are tasked with administering social assistance and services in the general framework of the federal Social Security Code (SGB). At the same time, horizontal fragmentation is very pronounced in the German welfare system. There is significant legal differentiation into distinct systems of social law governing different areas of social risk (organised in the twelve books of the SGB) and a related institutional diversification (Dingeldey, Reference Dingeldey, van Berkel, de Graaf and Sirovátka2011). In addition, the dual structure of free and public welfare organisations and the related strong role of charitable institutions means that municipalities partly transfer tasks concerning the delivery of social services to free, non-profit organisations while outsourcing to private service providers also plays an increasing role. Complexities and fragmentation are further enhanced by differences between insurance and tax-based elements and hence the plurality of different financing models (Boeckh et al., Reference Boeckh, Huster and Benz2011: 135). Following the tradition of the Bismarckian status-oriented and contribution-based social insurance system, there is a range of sectorally structured statutory social insurance sub-systems that cover distinct social risks, such as unemployment, accident, illness, or old age. Similar divisions characterise the tax-based welfare system: here, social laws and institutional responsibilities differ, for instance, for citizens in need of social assistance, housing allowances, family benefit compensations, child and youth welfare, or benefits for refugees and asylum seekers.
Due to the vertical and horizontal diversification of the German system of social assistance and welfare provision, benefits and services for citizens having financial or psycho-social difficulties are varied and spread across a plethora of responsible institutions. Depending on one’s particular life circumstances, one might, for example, apply for financial benefits or social services at the Federal Employment Agency or one of its regional agencies (which are responsible for child benefits and unemployment benefit I), the Jobcenter (responsible for unemployment benefit II and social benefits for members of the ‘community of need’ who are not capable of working), the Social Welfare Office (housing benefits and social assistance pursuant to SGB XII, i.e., benefits for people not capable of working), and the Youth Welfare Office (responsible for child and youth welfare according to SGB VIII), or the statutory pension, accident or health insurance funds.
The Polish welfare regime is variously characterised as a conservative familialistic welfare regime in which some welfare responsibilities are privatised (Glass and Fodor, Reference Glass and Fodor2007; Javornik, Reference Javornik2014), or an emergency welfare state (Inglot, Reference Inglot, Cerami and Vanhuysse2009). Concerning coverage, the Polish type of social assistance is placed in one cluster with Germany and characterised by ‘general schemes with additional categorical benefits covering most people in need’ (European Commission, Reference Marlier and Frazer2016: 7). In organisational terms, the system is decentralised and shifts the main responsibility for providing social assistance to municipalities. In this regard, the principle of subsidiarity also plays an important role in Poland and the social assistance system shows a ‘rather relevant degree of territorial and institutional fragmentation’ (Kazepov and Barberis, Reference Kazepov, Barberis, Marx and Nelson2013: 214). However, this concerns mainly vertical fragmentation. Regional-level institutions (Regionalny Ośrodek Pomocy Społecznej) in Poland are responsible for assessing needs and resources and for doing planning. In turn, county level (Powiatowe Centrum Pomocy Społecznej) institutions handle foster care and help to refugees, among other things. The core social assistance institution is the municipal social assistance centre (Ośrodek Pomocy Społecznej). Despite this vertical fragmentation of the system, regional and county-level institutions have limited powers over municipal social assistance centres, and there is no formal subordination between them. Social assistance centres are subordinate only to municipal government, organised and financed (with the exception of benefits and services for which money transfer is made from the national level) by the municipalities themselves. The centres are responsible for granting a wide range of social assistance in-cash and in-kind benefits, for the organisation of services (many of which are outsourced to NGOs or the private sector), and for performing social work. Typically, the assistance offered is based on a means-test and an interview at the applicant’s home.
Although the Polish social assistance system is less horizontally fragmented and more concentrated than the German one, some groups of users must contact institutions other than social assistance centres. For instance, in the city where our research was carried out, the offices for citizen matters at City Hall are responsible for handling the applications and granting the universal family benefit. As will be shown in the findings, this results in encounters of Polish interviewees with two (types of) institutions when applying for help: the social assistance centre and the municipal office. In smaller municipalities, both types of assistance are often located within the social assistance centre. Moreover, over the last two decades the Polish social assistance centres have been tasked with an increasing number of specialised support measures and have responded with greater functional specialisation. This has involved an internal organisational separation of administrative procedures from social work (Rymsza, Reference Rymsza2020) into distinct units which are often spatially dispersed. With an eye to reducing this complexity, a law allowing municipalities to run joint social services centres (Centra Usług Społecznych) was introduced in 2019.
As will be discussed in the presentation of findings below, despite these formal and organisational differences regarding the type and degree of fragmentation, there are important commonalities regarding how users experience fragmentation.
Findings
From our interview data, we have reconstructed two different ways in which fragmentation impacts users’ trust in social assistance. First, the (horizontal) institutional fragmentation of social welfare shapes the context for the formation of institutional (dis)trust. The relationship between fragmentation and institutional trust is mediated through the problems and advantages of ‘having to deal with many institutions’, as experienced and perceived by users. In the interviews, this experiential context was described most prominently with regard to (a) access to the social assistance system and (b) the coordination and exchange of information between institutions once inside the system. Secondly, a more direct relation between an experienced institutional fragmentation of social welfare and trust involves the crowding-in of trust at the level of personal encounters with frontline workers. Here, fragmentation can be conducive to the building of interpersonal trust in individual frontline workers, namely when they help clients navigate the system against a general context of opaque fragmentation.
Experienced institutional fragmentation of social welfare as a context for building institutional (dis)trust
Entering the welfare system
In terms of entering the welfare system, the experiences of Polish and German interviewees differ in fundamental ways. In Poland, the overall institutional structure of the social assistance system seems to clients to be clear and not overly complicated. When asked how they started receiving social assistance, they mostly recall that they just went to the nearest social assistance centre and, since all streets are linked with a certain social worker, they ‘just entered the right room and sat there in front of their desk’ (PL_CIT10_39)Footnote 4 or ‘just went there and signed up’ (PL_CIT17_39). Thus, neither information-related nor organisational issues seem a barrier to entering the system. Although they underscore the high level of strain in applying for benefits, Polish interviewees do not perceive the system as too complex and seem to have good knowledge and far-reaching clarity about local assistance institutions and about which institution or institutional unit ‘does what’ and is ‘responsible for what’. However, they do perceive the social assistance system as divided insofar as there are several locations they must go to when applying for help. This involves, for example, going to different units of one municipal social assistance centre when it is functionally and spatially divided. Our interviewees experience this as ‘different addresses’ they must go to and typically use the name of the street when describing their routes of applying for different kinds of support. Yet, these divisions are not related to issues of trust. In fact, Polish interviewees do not draw any direct connection between their experiences of entering the welfare system and (interpersonal or institutional) trust – a silence in the data that is particularly interesting when contrasted with the German case.
In the interviews with German citizens, the universe of social policy is described as a jungle, an opaque thicket of laws, regulations, and institutions in which responsibilities are not clear and in which interviewees speak of feeling powerless and exposed, even frightened. The differentiation of the German social assistance system is clearly experienced as fragmentation in the negative sense and framed by interviewees as having direct implications for trust. Responding to the question: ‘When I as a citizen approach the office, […] what can trust mean?’ (DE_CIT10_132), one of our interlocutors explains:
I think this aversion of people to the office is not so much against the person who works there, but rather against this opaque body of law, […] where nobody can see through anymore, right? And which is becoming more and more complicated and changing faster and faster and that the citizen feels a bit powerless and at the mercy of the professionals who do this every day. And I think the problem is that you feel so small and lost. […] I think that frightens many citizens now. And that’s what creates the distance to the office. It’s not the clerk who is perhaps nice and friendly and has helped. (DE_CIT10_133)
As this excerpt shows, the experience of having to deal with a system that is perceived as fragmented can violate central trustworthiness-criteria (such as reliability and the absence of fear) and affect the conditions for the formation of institutional trust in relatively direct ways. In particular, German interviewees emphasise the frequent referrals from one institution to another during the initial phase of clarification of responsibilities: ‘you’re always being run off, “we are not responsible for this concern”. Then you go somewhere else: “we are not responsible”’ (DE_CIT02_43). Based on such experiences, some interviewees have the impression that – regardless of the friendliness and helpfulness of individual caseworkers – the institutions of support are not willing to help, are not willing to feel responsible and tend to delegate or outsource everything (to other institutions, to charitable organisations, to the courts etc.). An interviewee speaks of citizens being ‘crushed’ between the institutions (DE_CIT10_65) whilst responsibility is pushed around on paper and ‘the departments or the different offices each go their own way’ (DE_CIT10_73).
Since there is no clear path or a guide to lead them through the ‘thicket’ of institutions, German interviewees engage in tiring research themselves in order to acquire the specialised knowledge they need to enter the welfare system in the first place: ‘it’s confusing to research your own way through this mess’, ‘you have to know your benefits and your rights’ (DE_CIT17_73) and ‘you have to fight in the extreme for things to which you actually have a right’ (DE_CIT17_83). Many express disappointment about not having been proactively informed about institutional responsibilities, procedures, and other possible benefits and support measures. Mimicking an employee of the Jobcenter, one interviewee recounts: ‘You are not supposed to enquire. That is something we don’t do here. Hand in an application or leave’ (DE_CIT05_135). Such disappointment about insufficient information and support further impacts citizens’ trust in the institutions. As another interviewee states:
I can’t say that I had any trust at all […], there is always mistrust because I often had the feeling that […] information does not match the information provided by others, i.e. when you call the hotline and ask for general information that does not match what the staff at the Jobcenter actually do. (DE_CIT17_97-99)
The uncertainties associated with informational discrepancies about access to the system in combination with the perception that institutions are not committed to truly taking on the responsibility for service provision form an experiential context that contains considerable obstacles to the formation of institutional trust. In the comparative analysis, this connection between experiences of trying to gain access to the system and trust was absent from the Polish data. However, entering the system is just one potentially trust-relevant context. From the literature, we can expect that, once inside the system, learning processes take place that can create, remedy, or further obstruct trust (Rautio, Reference Rautio2013; Zacka, Reference Zacka2017: 202). In this sense, repeated encounters with the institutions add another layer to the context in which trust and distrust develop.
Coordination and information exchange between institutions
Across the two country cases, coordination and information exchange between institutions were a salient trust-related theme in narratives around interviewees’ experiences with the application procedures once they had entered the system. In the Polish case, although knowledge of ‘where to go’ to apply for welfare benefits is not hard to obtain, interviewees recall troubles resulting from ‘having to deal with many institutions’ that appeared at the subsequent stage and that they did frame as relevant for their (dis)trust in institutions. Interviewees from both countries report about the compliance costs associated with the administrative procedures and the demand to collect and deliver documents from various institutions to proof eligibility. A Polish interviewee, for example, describes that between her social assistance centre and the closest copy point there is a trodden path through the grass, as welfare clients must go back and forth to copy documents. This was seen as oppressive and irritating, as illustrated in the following example:
So they were coming to my wife […] Those two women were coming, so at some point I couldn’t handle it and yelled at them, because they come all the time and still have some kind of orders and demands, that she didn’t do something. So I say: ‘guys, she is really fucked up in her head, it’s a problem for her to call anywhere, and you demand some kind of legal papers from her! She has no clue where to collect these papers from! Just explain this to her so she can understand!’ (PL_CIT13_60-62)
The notion of having ‘no clue where to collect these papers from’ indicates the overburdening task of ‘DIY-coordination’ imposed on welfare users in a context of experienced fragmentation. Moreover, interviewees comment that caseworkers often have specific expectations about documents from other institutions, whilst users have no influence on their content. In numerous cases they recall arguments with their caseworkers that the document they had brought from another institution was written incorrectly, not in the appropriate form or that they should apply at that institution to receive a different kind of decision.
Apart from these similarities, our comparative analysis reveals differences concerning the specific trust-related mechanisms at play in coordination and information exchange between institutions. Polish interviewees address a lack of knowledge about the relations between different kinds of welfare institutions and how exactly they cooperate or exchange information about them. Whilst they perceive some exchange of information about their situation as practical, they seem to feel insecure about it, as can be seen in the following passage:
In the past I had to do this. I needed to show them that I’m registered [at the unemployment office] and that I’d be seeing them on some date. But not now. I think they might be checking that themselves directly in the [unemployment] office now… (PL_CIT4_52-57)
Since they do not know where the information would be forwarded to, Polish interviewees often feel insecure about disclosing information to frontline workers and some feel this involves complex welfare systems exercising power and control over them. These feelings were even more triggered by frontline workers disclosing and reporting information about interviewees’ personal situation to other institutions. One of our discussion partners explains how she completely stopped trusting her caseworker, from whom she expected financial benefits only, when that caseworker filed information to the family court that our interviewee was being abused by her husband. She had not wanted such a filing to be made and thus was surprised and felt somewhat betrayed by the caseworker.
In contrast to their experiences of entering the system, the narrations of Polish interviewees about their experiences of being inside the system show how coordination and information exchange between institutions seem more trust-relevant. Transparency and confidentiality are among the trustworthiness criteria that, from interviewees’ perspective, are potentially damaged by the practices of coordination and information exchange in a largely centralised system.
In quite the opposite way, German interviewees note that, once they gain entrance to the system, there is no or very limited information exchange between the different institutions involved in welfare provision. As one interviewee recounts, ‘there was somehow no cooperation between offices, although I could have topped up my benefits in that way’ (DE_CIT17_25). In such situations, interviewees become acutely aware of the interdependencies between the different institutions of the social welfare system. Due to data protection considerations, neither information nor decisions travel between institutions on their own – interviewees must do the travelling themselves. Often this is experienced as being tossed around, as an ‘endless back and forth’, as being passed ‘from pillar to post’ (DE_CIT07_17). The same applies when citizens must apply at one office to receive a benefit from yet another: ‘Then the whole thing started all over again. Because that was a new office. Then it was the same again.’ (DE_CIT05_105). For users, the institutional interdependencies combined with a lack of coordination and information exchange can create uncertainty, delays, and gaps in their support. Frustration with the lack of coordination was an experience widely shared among German interviewees and can further contribute to the obstacles to trust-formation related to entering the system mentioned above. Some interviewees link these problems explicitly to issues of institutional trust. As one respondent with experiences with various social welfare institutions says:
the offices do not cooperate with each other, so you are rarely informed that you can apply for something additional or top up another benefit at another office. […] it’s very opaque. […] You have to go to so many other offices […]. It is already difficult and then also to find out which benefits can be combined and which cannot. […]. And the Jobcenters are not obliged […] to explain to you what your rights are. […] So I would like the public offices to cooperate with each other, to know what the others are doing and to refer people to them and also point out what else they can apply for. (DE_CIT17_73)
On the question of trust in her dealings with the welfare institutions, she explains:
For me, trust is a feeling that only builds up when […] the employees […] explain things to me, tell me what else I can do, […] where I can apply for something else, where I can go. So that there is a certain openness […] to actually offer me support in the application process and so on […] I’m not sceptical about employees from the outset, but rather about the Jobcenter as an organisation. Because they don’t work hand in hand. (DE_CIT17_99-115)
Here, the interviewee clearly distinguishes between a level of interpersonal trust and institutional trust. Her scepticism explicitly relates to the perceived lack of coordination and its consequences for the claiming of rights and entitlements. Against this backdrop, some of the German interviewees are critical of the fact that there is no data exchange between the different institutions, even though they feel, at the same time, that they are being screened and controlled excessively. They desire greater centralisation, hoping this would lead to easier procedures and increased transparency. That is, they think that the system itself should be reformed and simplified. Others think that improved cross-institutional consultation services and more holistic and individually tailored counselling measures with a broader view of citizens’ life situations would improve access to benefits and services in the framework of the existing system.
Thus, interviewees’ experiences of being inside the system contribute to the formation of (dis)trust in distinctly different ways. In the Polish case, and although entry into the system was experienced as rather trust-neutral, compliance costs and a perceived intransparency concerning the exchange of information contribute to suspicion and a general feeling of powerlessness. From their perspective, even the rather centralised Polish welfare system is experienced as fragmented in so far as coordination and information exchange involve a variety of other actors. In the German case, the lack of coordination and information exchange are experienced as a continuation and reinforcement of the entry barriers to the system, making it even more difficult to trust that the social assistance system is designed to actually provide support. Both contexts therefore contain elements that are potentially trust-detrimental, but for different reasons. Despite these differences, the Polish and German interviews share an important commonality that concerns the crowding-in of trust at the level of personal encounters when individual caseworkers provide support in navigating the system.
Experienced institutional fragmentation of social welfare as a context for building interpersonal trust
Interviewees from both countries underscore the positive role of caseworkers who gave precise information about procedures, helping citizens navigate the system. A Polish interviewee describes this in the following fashion:
when I had a good carer, everything was running normally. The guy led us through [the system], because he knew exactly how to do it. And then the carer was changed because that one became a director. And the woman that came in just couldn’t be bothered. (PL_CIT14_61)
The expression that the caseworker was ‘leading them through’ the system is crucial. It can be contrasted with an indifferent or even unfriendly type of caseworker who formally represents the system, but, in fact, acts more as a gatekeeper than a guide to welfare benefits and social services. Individual frontline workers who do provide relevant information, even though they are not strictly responsible, are seen as ‘good’ caseworkers and contrasted with those who shirk responsibility and do not provide explanations or further advice. As a German interviewee puts it:
If you have a good case worker, […] if, for example, the Jobcenter then has no way of helping you anywhere, they say, for example, ‘listen, take these and the documents, try the social welfare office, for example. You can also go there and talk to them. We can’t do that or we’re not allowed to do that or something else’. […] If you have a good caseworker, they will explain it to you. […] But, as I said, there are also those who just say, ‘Fact, fact, fact. That’s all we can do’. (DE_CIT23_30)
Reacting to our question on the role of trust in encounters with the Jobcenter, the same interviewee continues: ‘Because I can’t trust a person who I don’t like or who just seems disrespectful and provocative towards me […]. Or if they just [say]: “Yes, I can’t help you any further”’ (DE_CIT23_49-52). Such notions of a good caseworker acting as navigator through the system are also apparent in expressions like ‘receiving all kind of explanations that one needed’ (PL_CIT4_41), being ‘offered a range of options’ (PL_CIT6_180) and, above all, being assisted by a caseworker when applying for help in a hostile or at least very difficult institutional context.
In the Polish interviews, the verbatim use of the word trust, in the meaning of trust in welfare institutions, appeared only in reference to individual frontline workers and in particular to their ability to lead users through the fragmented system. Responding to the question ‘And would you say that you have trust in the [welfare] institution as a whole, or rather not?’ (PL_CIT6_137), one of our interview partners states:
It’s hard to say. Well, it all really depends on the individual, because you don’t have contact with the whole institution, but only with this one person. If something needs to be done somewhere further, then that person takes care of that. (PL_CIT6_138)
In the German case, distinctions between institutional and interpersonal forms of trust are more explicitly drawn in interviewees’ narratives. The experience of being confronted with a thicket of excessively complex and complicated rules and procedures was presented by some interviewees as jeopardising their faith that the social security system aims to provide help and support. As mentioned in the previous section, navigating the system is described as an ‘endless battle’ (DE_CIT05_73), a struggle, sometimes even a ‘war’ (DE_CIT12_25), in which interviewees feel they must fight to claim that to which they have a right. Individual caseworkers acting as partners in this fight are considered trustworthy even though the system as such continues to be met with distrust.
As the comparative analysis shows, having a caseworker who acts as a navigator through the system is important in both the less fragmented Polish and the more fragmented German context. The crowding-in of trust at the level of personal encounters shows how the experience of fragmentation forms a context moderating between different forms, objects, and levels of trust. Interpersonal trust in a caseworker is not necessarily trust in a representative of the system. To the contrary, the interviews demonstrate how distrust in the institutions can coexist with trust in individual caseworkers who are perceived as a corrective to, or even allies against, a system that is perceived as hostile or unresponsive. This finding complicates existing accounts of the trust-relations between users and frontline workers (Fersch, Reference Fersch2016; Zacka, Reference Zacka2017).
Concluding discussion
In line with previous research (Bakken and van der Wel, Reference Bakken and van der Wel2022; Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020), our study confirms that horizontal institutional fragmentation is a relevant aspect in processes of institutional (dis)trust formation. It thereby complements and goes beyond research interested in the role of welfare state institutions and welfare policies in the crowding-in or crowding-out of social capital and trust (e.g., Fukuyama, Reference Fukuyama1995; Putnam, Reference Putnam and Putnam2002: 413–414; Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005: 343). Our findings show that, next to welfare state size and the redistributive principles of welfare policies, organisational design is an important factor in its own right. Insofar as procedures in both systems involve eligibility checks, elements of conditionality, and functional specialisation, users’ experiences include the necessity of visiting different units of the same institution at different addresses, being in contact with institutions that do not strictly belong to the social assistance system but are relevant in applying for welfare benefits, and having to acquire the necessary information and practical knowledge to navigate the system and its procedures. Thus, from a user’s perspective, fragmentation may appear ubiquitous and not necessarily related to formal institutional characteristics of the social assistance system in question. However, as our analysis has shown, the pronounced formal fragmentation of the German system does seem to make a difference insofar as issues of institutional (dis)trust are directly salient already at the stage of entering the system whereas in Poland trust-related aspects were made relevant only with regard to the procedures once inside the system.
We have reconstructed three ways in which institutional fragmentation affects (dis)trust. First, in general terms, the experienced consequences of fragmentation may decrease trust through perceived distributive and procedural injustices, namely when social assistance users conclude that the system does not respond to their needs in an adequate, transparent, and fair manner (Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005; van Ryzin, Reference van Ryzin2011; Grönlund and Setälä, Reference Grönlund and Setälä2012). Difficulties with entering the system and with finding the institution responsible for dealing with their needs were reported mainly in the German case while being sent from pillar to post to bring ‘yet one more document’ from elsewhere or delays and refusal of benefits because of missing or incorrect documents from third parties were problematised in both countries. Referrals may prove trust-detrimental in that they negatively affect users’ perceptions of institutions as reliable and responsible partners, committed to fulfilling their obligation to provide support. Outright distrust emerges when citizens have the feeling that this is part of a deliberative state strategy to shirk responsibility and deprive them of benefitting fully from their entitlements.
Secondly, next to perceptions of justice, experienced administrative burdens (Moynihan et al., Reference Moynihan, Herd and Harvey2015) were a salient theme in the interviews in both countries. The observation that in Poland they only become relevant once users have entered the social assistance system points to the importance of the temporal order in which administrative burdens and associated costs become relevant (Baekgaard and Tankink, Reference Baekgaard and Tankink2022: 19). The costs associated with having to visit different institutions, learn about procedures, and comply with administrative demands repeatedly were a salient theme in both settings, although learning costs seem higher in the German case where responsibilities and entitlements were often unclear to interviewees. During application procedures, interviewees’ overall administrative burden was exacerbated by a lack of information exchange and coordination between institutions, as in the German case, or by an excessive, untransparent, or informal exchange of information, as in the Polish case. The cross-national analysis provides indications that, due to the differences in formal horizontal fragmentation, the pros and cons of shared information relate to different mechanisms of trust formation and concern different trustworthiness criteria. In the Polish case, concerns about confidentiality and data privacy were salient themes, whereas in the German case, the lack of information exchange is perceived as a further violation of reliability as a central trustworthiness criterion.
Thirdly, while our findings concerning institutional fragmentation as a context for the formation of (dis)trust confirm the potentially trust-detrimental effects of fragmentation discussed in the literature (Berg and Dahl, Reference Berg and Dahl2020), the crowding-in of trust goes beyond the state of art. Contrary to what has been found in the literature, we have shown how the experience of institutional fragmentation may be conducive to the building of interpersonal trust in individual frontline workers. Across the two cases, the institutional context provided a setting in which meeting a caseworker willing to provide guidance in navigating the social assistance system and contacting other institutions, sometimes beyond their formal institutional affiliation and responsibilities, contributed to trust-building on the personal level. But rather than perceiving such caseworkers as representing the system, having a ‘good’ caseworker was seen as an exception to the rule, a corrective to rather than an attribute of the system. In this sense, our analysis indicates that there is a functional relation between personal trust (in a caseworker) and institutional distrust (concerning the social assistance system), which merits further attention. In so far as caseworkers are perceived as navigators across the narrow boundaries of institutional responsibilities, the level of interpersonal relations becomes a crucial element in processes of (dis)trust formation. This goes beyond questions of sympathy and individual attributes of caseworkers (such as their perceived professionalism, impartiality, or honesty; cf. Tyler, Reference Tyler and Sarat2004; van Ryzin, Reference van Ryzin2011; Grönlund and Setälä, Reference Grönlund and Setälä2012; Rautio, Reference Rautio2013) and shows how trust and distrust in institutions can coexist and concern different levels and different aspects of an institutional entity simultaneously (Lahusen, Reference Lahusen2024; Theiss and Szelewa, Reference Theiss and Szelewa2025).
As Moynihan et al. have argued, ‘administrative burdens mediate how citizens experience the state as a positive or negative force, frame how they understand their relationship with it’ (Reference Moynihan, Herd and Harvey2015: 44). It seems plausible to expect that experienced administrative burdens also mediate between institutional design and trust, and influence whether and how social assistance users develop trust in the system or in an individual caseworker who lifts (or increases) some of the burden. In terms of the policy-related and practical implications of our study, our findings indicate that, on the one hand, institutional trust may be fostered through improved overall coordination, transparency and clear accountability-mechanisms that enable citizens to rely on institutions to fulfil their mandated commitments (Lahusen, Reference Lahusen2024: 95). On the other hand, an organisational culture and communicative strategies that promote and present frontline workers’ support in navigating a fragmented system as a genuine and necessary part of their work as institutional representatives – and not just as an effort of committed individuals – would likely be conducive to the formation of institutional trust.
Beyond the relatively narrow focus of our sample of social assistance users, more research is needed to study how fragmentation becomes relevant in other policy fields and whether its effects vary between groups of users. Furthermore, it seems promising to investigate in more detail how and when different kinds of administrative burden become relevant in different institutional settings, how they intersect, and what consequences this carries not only for perceptions of procedural justice and trust-formation, but also for equity in gaining access to entitlements and realising social rights (Brettschneider, Reference Brettschneider2019: 747). Further avenues of investigation open up in regard to the role of digitalisation and e-government in shaping the perceived consequences of institutional fragmentation. While these could potentially mitigate some of the more problematic aspects of fragmentation (especially concerning coordination and information exchange), they also carry the danger of further extending or even displacing the accountability chain, an aspect that has been identified as being detrimental to institutional trust in the context of outsourcing of public services (Berg and Johansson, Reference Berg and Johansson2020). Concerning broader questions of how welfare state institutions might affect not only institutional, but also generalised social trust, our findings indicate the need for more systematic research into how the meso-level of welfare states’ organisational design may lead to crowding-in and crowding-out of different kinds of social capital simultaneously (Putnam, Reference Putnam and Putnam2002: 413–414; Kumlin and Rothstein, Reference Kumlin and Rothstein2005: 343) and into the ways in which social and institutional trust are interlinked within this context (Newton et al., Reference Newton, Stolle, Zmerli and Uslaner2018). Given the relational and reciprocal nature of trust-dynamics, these questions are of utmost importance for debates around the legitimacy of state institutions, the functioning of democratic governance and social equity and justice.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all interviewees for sharing their experiences and insights with us.
Funding statement
The results presented in this article have been obtained within the project ‘Enlightened trust: An examination of trust and distrust in governance–conditions, effects and remedies’ (EnTrust). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 870572. The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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