Samenvatting

In recent years, contacts between citizens and the government have increasingly become digital. Most people believe that the development toward more digital and thus more impersonal contact could be negative in terms of procedural justice and policy effectiveness. Higher educated and younger citizens embrace contact through the internet more than lower educated and older citizens. This study questions the call for more personal contact. Based on a panel survey, two different kinds of recipients of public assistance are compared: recipients of municipal social services (N=596) and recipients of unemployment benefits (N=709). Because of the social-demographic characteristics mentioned earlier, the recipients of the former are expected to be more negative about digital contact than the latter. This study identifies how these types of recipients of public assistance prefer to have contact with their municipality or agency, and how that works in practice. It shows that neither personal contact preferences, nor the way contact works in practice are decisive for satisfaction with the contact, but the way those two elements are matched. A match of impersonal contact leads to similar satisfaction as a match of personal contact.