of respondents’ demographic characteristics such as gender, years of schooling, and age. While LAPOP allows the identification of respondents living in rural and urban areas, Latinobar ́ometro is exclusively conducted in urban areas (albeit it allows to distinguish between small and large urbanization). Importantly, both survey provide information regarding the municipality of residence for each respondent which allows to link income data discussed below as well as other time varying municipality-level characteristics (e.g., crime rates or national government transfers).

I focus my analysis in 10 outcome variables. From LAPOP I focus on 1) trust in the president, 2) trust in the municipal government, 3) trust in the national legislature, 4) confidence in the judicial system, 5) trust in mass media, and 6) trust in the Catholic church. All trust questions asked about trustworthiness on the aforementioned institutions. Specifically, LAPOP asks “To what extent do you trust the President/Municipality/National Legislature/Mass Media/Church”. Respondents provide ordinal answers from 1 (not at all) to 7 (a lot). I construct dichotomic variables taking value of 1 if the answer is 5 or more, 0 otherwise. For the case of confidence in judicial system the question asked is slightly different: “If you were a victim of a robbery or assault how much faith do you have that the judicial system would punish the guilty?” The answers go from 1 (a lot) to 4 (little). I coded confidence in the judicial system as 1 if the answer is “a lot” or “some”, 0 otherwise. I dichotomize ordinal dependent variables for three main practical reasons: to ease the interpretation of the results, to employ more reliable measure of trust/confidence, and to facilitate the computation of my econometrics models.<sup>3</sup> Nonetheless, it is important to note that none of the main results depends on this dichotomization approach (see Table A.2 in the appendix).

From Latinobar ́ometro I focus on the following 4 variables: 1) perception of income distribution in the country being unfair, 2) generalized trust, 3) preference for democracy, and 4) satisfaction with democracy. The first question asked is “How fair do you think income distribution is in El Salvador?” The possible answers are“very fair”, “fair”, “unfair” or “very unfair”. Following Reyes and Gasparini (2021) I coded this variable as 1 if individuals answer “unfair” or “very unfair”, 0 otherwise. Generalized trust is based on the question“Generally speaking, would you say that you can trust most people, or that you can never be too careful when dealing with others” I coded generalized trust equals 1 if answer is “you can trust most people”, 0 otherwise. Finally, the variable preference for democracy takes the value 1 if the respondent states “Democracy is preferable to any other kind of government”, 0 otherwise. The variable satisfied with democracy takes the value 1 if the respondent answers “very satisfied” or“fairly satisfied” to the question “In general, would you say that you are very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied or not at all satisfied with the

> 3Arguably, ordered responses from 1 to 7 are not highly reliable in terms of providing precise information about respondent differences in trust. In this sense, dichotomizing the highest values of response may better indicate whether a given respondent has a high level of trust. On the other hand and as discussed below, my main econometric model includes fixed effects at both the municipality and year levels. This makes the computation of a non-linear model difficult as no default approach for fitting fixed-effects models for ordered responses exists.

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