Abstract: With the increase in government procurement of services from social organizations, government funding has become the main source of funding for most social organizations. The perspective of government-society relations is the traditional path to explain government support, and few studies have revealed the motives behind government funding from a trust and data-based perspective. The paper adopts a mixed research design, based on 384 valid samples collected through snowballing sampling, and employs the least squares method to verify factors involved in social organizations' access to government funding; on this basis, the multi-case comparison method is adopted to further reveal the mechanism of action between various factors. The paper reveals that government tends to choose “relational trust” rather than “professional trust” indicators to measure whether to provide funding. The formation of relational trust mechanisms promotes mutual recognition in the interaction, and social organizations with an open, explicit, and formal organizational trust are more likely to receive government funding. This indicates that: 1) under this non-competitive government funding allocation mechanism, once social organizations allocate too much resources to relationship building, they may reduce their investment in professional abilities; 2) in the long run, government funding allocation will deviate from the optimal threshold, and it will not be able to achieve the original intention of designing a government procurement service system.

Key words: social organizations, government funding, relationship trust, professional trust, organizational relationship trust