Latinobarómetro Corporation conducts the annual study to determine individual perceptions on socioeconomic and political issues in Latin American countries. Covering 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the survey is the largest regional database on citizen attitudes towards democracy. It obtains representative national samples using a stratified random sampling process that is weighted to reflect each country’s population. The latest available survey data was released in October 2021 and comprises 20,204 observations that represent more than 600 million inhabitants in the region. Unfortunately, it does not include most of the insular countries in the region, such as Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and other small islands in the Caribbean.

The fieldwork was largely carried out face-to-face between October 26 and December 15, 2020. The only exception was Argentina, where interviews were conducted virtually between April 26 and May 16, 2021, because of local conditions related to the Covid-19 pandemic (Latinobarómetro Corporation 2021). In ten South American countries along with Mexico, samples of 1,200 representative cases were taken of citizens aged 18 and over (16 years in Brazil), and 1,000 cases in the six countries of Central America and in the Dominican Republic. The 2020 survey comprises a single questionnaire containing 81 questions on perceptions and 30 questions on socioeconomic status.

Trust in government is one of the independent variables of this study. The survey inquired about respondents’ trust in governmental institutions like the national government, the judiciary, congress, and the national electoral body. All these variables are used simultaneously as explanatory variables. We focus on institutional trust rather than generalized support for the system as a whole or confidence in specific leaders. We include also interpersonal trust in the measurement of social trust. The dependent variable in this study is citizen participation, which can take the form of signing a petition, taking part in authorized demonstrations, and working to resolve problems facing the community. Because trust may interact differently with each of these, we will investigate the relationship between trust and all three types of participation separately.

The analyses conducted include a set of control variables that previous research has shown to predict whether a person will participate (Lee and Schachter, 2019). These variables are further classified as demographic variables and perception variables. Age, gender, education level, subjective income level, subjective social class, reception of subsidies, employment status, ability to save money, house ownership, internet access, and sewerage access are the variables in the first group. The second set of variables includes the respondent’s level of interest in politics, perceived freedom of expression and perceived freedom to join any organization without fear, her experience of discrimination, having been a victim of a crime, and food insecurity status. Annex A includes the full description of the variables.

Finally, we explore whether trust is more cyclical than structural. If it is a cyclical phenomenon, people might tend more naturally to compare their well-being to a temporal reference point of themselves. Instead, if it is structural, trust should expectedly not be influenced by the respondent’s mood at the time of the interview.<sup>8</sup>

> 8 Analyses of the Arab Spring show that <mark>increasing unhappiness sustained for long periods of time was reflected in perceptions of declining standards of living. Those perceptions were, in turn, associated with dissatisfaction with the quality of public services, the shortage of formal-</mark>

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