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Introduction
In modern western societies, the welfare state offers a source of security against social risks. However, in order to really function as social risk insurance, the welfare state institutions must be trusted by the inhabitants. Taylor-Gooby (2009) described such trust as “the belief that the services and provisions that make up the welfare state will actually work when you need them” (p. 6). Furthermore, Kumlin and Rothstein (2005) highlighted how positive perceptions of the institutions of the welfare state are an important precondition for generating social trust (i.e. trust between people) based on the assumption that “[…] people’s views of the society around them and their fellow human beings are partly shaped by their contacts with such public welfare-state institutions” (p. 13).
Albeit for many different reasons, scholars seem to agree that trust in the welfare state is of crucial importance. However, very few researchers have been interested in what factors make people trust a welfare state and its institutions and which mechanisms create this trust. In shedding light on these questions, migrants constitute a very interesting case: being in a new context both creates the necessity for the individual to reflect on otherwise tacit knowledge (Legido-Quigley et al., 2014) and requires some kind of handling of the “new” institutional setting on the other. The purpose of this paper is therefore to study how people who have migrated from a broad range of countries to one destination country view the welfare state institutions there: will they develop trust in them and what are the underlying mechanisms behind this?
The empirical materials analyzed in this paper are qualitative interviews with migrants in Denmark on their experiences, perceptions and practices concerning the welfare state institutions in their host country. All of our interviewees considered the institutions of the Danish welfare state to be trustworthy; however, the extent of this trust varied. Against the background of a multi-dimensional theoretical understanding of trust, we discuss how institutional fairness and justice, functioning, experiences and encounters with welfare state professionals play a role in the emergence of migrant trust in the welfare state, as well as how the different societal levels and modes of trust are interrelated.
We first introduce the context of the Danish welfare state from a...