The Welfare State And Social Trust: A Three-Dimensional Approach Of Analysis

This paper is focused on analyzing recent trends in the evolution of welfare state approaches to securing an individual’s well-being and predicting their effects on social trust, given the relationship between relevant social spending and social trust obtained from the empirical analysis. The overview of the literature on welfare state transformation shows that under pressure of external and internal factors, social policies undergo a deep restructuring concerning both the level of spending and the character of social provisions. These trends are diverse, but have one feature in common - they are usually derived from the increasingly used liberal paradigm, leading to minimizing the state intervention and maximizing an individual’s motivation to be re-commodified in the labor market.