Typologies of institutional trust: the Chilean case using ICCS 2016.

• In Event: Citizenship and democratic education using large-scale assessments: Person-centered approaches.

Proposal

A very relevant part of democratic legitimacy relies on citizens' support existing political institutions (Lipset, 1960). This implies that society must be able to "generate and maintain" beliefs consistent with this form of government and also diminish those inconsistent beliefs. In this vein, Latin American countries have a debt in promoting this kind of beliefs. Several studies have shown that in Latin American countries the level of political trust in adult citizen is the lowest than other regions of the world. This pattern tends to be similar in young people, but there is important heterogeneity among institutions. For instance, the trust in political parties, courts of justice and the police are relatively lower than other countries, but the trust in other institutions, such as the school is higher (Schulz, Ainley, Cox, & Friedman, 2018). In this context, can we distinguish different profiles of trust in institutions? particularly, there are young people that trust only in some type of institutions and do not in others? or there are young people that trust in all institutions? In order to address these questions adequately across institutions, a person-centered approach could be a good way to estimate the ‘style’ of trust that young people develop (Reichert, 2016).
The objective of this paper is twofold, first, to identify the ‘style’ of trust observed in young people, and second, to evaluate the characteristics that are associated with different styles of trust.
The analyzed data was obtained from the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS). This study was applied in 2016 to eighth-grade student's sample (n=140000) from 38 countries. The analyses for this paper considers the data from Chile, using set items that measure the level of trust in a variety of institutions, such as government, courts of justice, the police, political parties, media, schools, armed forces, among others. The data analysis is/will be conducted with a mixture modeling framework that combines latent class analysis and multinomial logistic regressions, using the package poLCA in the R software (Linzer & Lewis, 2011).
The main results suggest that are four styles of trust. One of it, show higher trust in all institutions, other show the lowest trust in all institutions and two intermediate styles that show trust differentiating the type of institutions. The presentation will discuss the implications for the crisis of institutional trust as delegitimization of democracy.

Author

• Daniel Andres Miranda-Fuenzalida, Universidad Católica de Chile