Sources of Public Trust in Latin America’s Courts

• In Event: Political Preferences and Public Opinion in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article aims to uncover the sources of judicial trust in Latin America. Despite the integral role of the judiciary to democracy, we know relatively little about the bases of public trust in this institution outside of advanced democracies. We leverage temporal and cross-sectional variation in judicial trust in Latin America and aim to elucidate its microfoundations. We integrate institutional trust and judicial politics literatures and test hypotheses with a multilevel dataset comprised of region-wide survey data spanning 1995 to 2017, as well as country-level institutional and economic factors. We find that citizens’ evaluations respond primarily to subjective perceptions of economic and regime performance, that citizens on average are more trusting only of accessible judiciaries, and that experience in the judicial system decreases trust on average. Only the best-educated respond to institutional quality (the rule of law) in their evaluations. We conclude with implications for democracy and judicial reform efforts.

Authors

• David De Micheli, University of Utah

• Whitney K Taylor, San Francisco State University