similar pattern to signing a petition given its associated costs. If this prediction is true, voting would be negatively influenced by the level of trust in the incumbent national government and positively driven by trust in electoral authorities. The extent to which those influences remain important from election to election will likely depend on changes in the individual characteristics and political identities of the electorate.

Our results also confirm that analytical tools positing simple associations between trust and participation may produce misleadingly strong and conclusive associations than truly exist in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. In short, while the Logit analyses shed some light on the trust and socioeconomic variables that are significant in determining citizen engagement, the construction of decision trees allows us to unpack complex nonlinearities among those variables and their effect on participation. For example, socioeconomic characteristics such as income, age, or education levels are only relevant if certain conditions are met (e.g., having an interest in politics or having experienced discrimination). Individual characteristics such as internet access, on the other hand, will only play a role after a certain age. From both approaches we conclude that, while governmental trust variables are important, they are not the key drivers of participation. Rather, as decision tree estimation makes clear, having an interest in politics and having felt discriminated against seem to be the ultimate factors driving participation in all three models, together with age, income and education levels. Political trust, on the other hand, only plays a subordinate role on its own. The weak correlations between trust and individual, socioeconomic and perception variables confirm that political trust is not markedly influenced by individual characteristics or circumstances (see table B1 in annex B).

# 6. Concluding Remarks

We began the paper by asking whether there is a link between trust in government and citizen engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean and, if so, in which direction the link operates. The quantitative analyses conducted throughout this work demonstrate the existence of a link, but one that is neither simple nor linear, and whose mechanism is far from straightforward. For example, we have found that trust in the national government decreases participation when it comes to signing a petition. But the same trust does not appear to have any significant effect on the other two types of engagement studied: participating in demonstrations and community activism. This could be partially related to the former requiring less effort and commitment, i.e., bearing a lower financial, economic, and political cost than the latter. As such, we argue that trust in governmental institutions will only play a role in determining citizen participation when the expected net costs of participation are sufficiently low or the goals pursued justify costly levels of engagement. A similar pattern emerges when trust in other governmental institutions is taken into account, such as trust in the police, which significantly influences participation in demonstrations but not the other two types of participation; or trust in the judiciary, which only influences citizen engagement in the form of working to solve community problems. By way of explanation, citizens likely weigh the risk of facing police repression when attending a demonstration, or are discouraged from are evaluating actual rather than intended participation or engagement in an unspecified future.

25