The Fragility of Trust: Interpersonal Encounters, Institutional Distrust, and Conditional Spillovers in the Area of Social Service Delivery

ABSTRACT This paper examines social assistance for vulnerable families at the frontline level of service delivery, exploring how citizens' trust and distrust are shaped within this administrative context. It addresses three questions: Do citizens distinguish between trust and distrust in frontline workers and public institutions when reporting on their encounters with welfare services? Which key attributes of trustworthiness emerge from their experiences at each of these levels? And most importantly, to what extent does interpersonal trust‐building repair institutional trustworthiness and spill over into institutional trust? The analysis is based on interviews with vulnerable citizens accessing the social assistance system in seven European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Serbia). The findings show that trust is situational and bounded, and that trust spillovers are conditional: while openness in face‐to‐face interactions can temporarily mitigate bureaucratic opacity, these effects seldom translate into broader perceptions of institutional trustworthiness, thus mirroring the relevance of various mediating factors. Conceptually, the paper frames trust and distrust in welfare governance as multi‐level phenomena shaped by the administrative context and constrained by the asymmetries that characterize social service delivery in situations of vulnerability.