Broken Trust. Confidence Gaps and Distrust in Latin America.

Lucia Di Stefano,Andrea Ciacci,Enrico Ivaldi,Paolo Parra Saiani

doi:10.1007/s11205-021-02796-3

Abstract

Latin American societies show lower levels of political trust when compared to other regions of the world. The lack of trust in institutions can led to ineffective management of public affairs, social crises, lack of transparency, economic problems and even difficulties in countering pandemics. The objective of this work is to build an index (LADI) that provides a measure of the level of perceived distrust in the institutions of the different Latin American countries and its variations over the period from 2008 to 2018. The data used for this analysis are of a subjective nature and come from the series of surveys provided by Latinobarómetro. To develop the analysis, we have used a quantitative approach of a partially non-compensatory aggregative type, known as Adjusted Mazziotta and Pareto Index. The results show a generalized increase of distrust in the years 2017 and 2018 for several Latin American countries. On the other hand, in countries where the rule of law is more consolidated, a best perception of the functioning of democracy emerges.

Highlights

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the so-called “confidence gaps”, which would constitute threats to the legitimacy of democratic institutions and obstacles to economic growth
While the concept of trust is referred to both kinds of relations, it is necessary to differentiate them: if intersubjective trust has to do with the contingency associated with the agency of the other, the institutional trust deals with performance and reliability (Luhmann, 1988; Seligman, 1997; Hardin, 2002)
The aim of this paper is to construct an index, called Latin American Distrust Index (LADI) that provides a measure of the perceived distrust level toward the institutions of the different Latin American countries

Summary

Introduction

There has been a renewed interest in the so-called “confidence gaps”, which would constitute threats to the legitimacy of democratic institutions and obstacles to economic growth. The quality of life at local level can be one of the determinants of trust or distrust in the institutions: “if individuals perceive government as having a primarily negative impact on their quality of life, a reluctance to trust government is a likely outcome” (Yonk & Smith, 2018). The level of this uncertainty is the complex product of several factors: “Normally, trust is a response to good institutional performance, but it is an essential condition for effective governance. Our analysis found that COVID-19 mortality relates to income inequality and specific dimensions of social capital after other cross-national differences in wealth, population size, and population age were controlled” (2020). Marlow et al (2007), van der Weerd et al (2011) and Ozawa and Stack (2013) reach the same conclusions

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Conclusion