Political trust in Ecuador 1996–2020

Absztrakt (kivonat)

“The Crisis of Democracy” report of 1975 set the alarm of declining support for democratic regimes among industrialized societies. The study of support and trust in democratic institutions has grown substantially among scholars interested in the long-term stability of democracies around the world. Micro and macro-level causes and consequences of low political trust have been hypothesized, leading to uncover the relationship of low political trust and the rise of authoritarian and populist regimes as the recent and actual ones in Europe, North American, and Latin America. Considering how different these regions are, we abide by Inglehart’s “silent revolution” paradigm to understand how individuals’ perceptions are affected by the performance of their political and economic institutions, the higher levels of education they are acquiring in time, cohort replacement, and the changes in the economic structure of their nations. Few studies measure and analyze political trust in Latin America even when it has the lowest levels of political trust in the world and proves to be a fertile ground to study it because of its particular historical characteristics (dictatorships, neoliberal periods of high political instability, and the recent "turn to the left"). This paper explores the behavior of political trust in Ecuador between 1996 and 2020 performing OLS regression with individual-level panel data from public opinion poll Latinobarometro which collects data in a yearly basis in the region. Considering Ecuadorian political culture and current circumstances, we aim to uncover if political trust is influenced by materialist values or by post-materialist values. We also question if younger cohorts are more or less trustworthy than older cohorts in Ecuador and how has the “left turn” influenced political trust in Ecuador? We performed cohort replacement analysis using linear decomposition to examine whether the change of attitudes toward political institutions is attributed to cohort replacement or it is an actual change in time. We found that in Ecuador, materialist values such as the evaluation of the national economic performance, job stability, and individuals’ perceptions of more fair income distribution boost political trust, and that post-materialist values have a considerable effect only when the perception of fairness in income distribution is removed of our models. In Ecuador, contradictory to previous research, we found that younger cohorts are more trustworthy than older cohorts. We also introduce a critical discussion around ethnicity which, contrary to our expectations, did not provide significant effects on our models.