getting involved in community activism if they perceive the courts to be corrupt.

Our evidence shows that trust in various government institutions affects political participation somewhat, but neither the magnitude nor the direction of the effect is consistent among the three types of participation that were examined in this study. Simply put, neither the stealth nor deliberative democracy theories appear to be fitting explanations behind political participation in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, machine learning approaches are shown to be more precise than overly simplistic theories in unpacking the intricate and complex relationships connecting political trust and citizen engagement, a finding that likely holds not only in Latin America and the Caribbean. Trust is a driver of participation for an individual only after certain levels of education, age, and political interest are combined with experiences of discrimination and violence.

These findings have several policy implications. Our results neither directly support nor reject the notion that transformational changes such as curbing corruption, boosting government transparency, strengthening the social contract, or delivering long overdue reforms would be effective in increasing citizen participation in politics. In any case, such changes do not come about on their own. For example, disseminating more information is arguably not enough to effectively increase accountability in a context of low trust (Keefer and Scartascini, 2022). Our findings, instead, suggest a need to focus discussion on whether relatively modest changes can nudge citizens towards participation and trust in the political process. Making political institutions more familiar and closer to citizens, reducing the bureaucratic costs of participation, and promoting grassroots organizations all might boost political participation, particularly if aligned with other drivers. These objectives can be realized by facilitating scrutiny and debate over the political process in the media, cultivating an early interest in politics in schools, holding open days across public institutions, ensuring the right to protest safely, lowering the number of signatures required on petitions to elevate issues to authorities, and providing technical support to neighborhood associations, to mention a few. Lesson from Banerjee and Duflo’s (2011) small radical thinking to fight global poverty might also be relevant in the context of citizen participation.

The analyses conducted here can be replicated elsewhere by developing machine learning methods able to “learn” from datasets covering other regional or national settings. Future research on the linkages between political trust and citizen engagement in the Latin America and the Caribbean region and in other regions should also consider other emerging forms of political engagement like e-participation—that is, online political activity such as, for example, participating in online surveys, using government digital transparency, or adding political banners to profile pictures on Facebook, among others—in addition to voting. It should also more precisely unpack data on different forms of trust, for example in national versus local governments, or across different branches of the police, armed forces, and judiciary. More detailed information is also needed to capture the types of community problems citizens engage or the type of causes that participation in demonstrations are sought to reverse, which are not currently asked in Latinobarómetro. Future efforts would also benefit from additional investments in quantifying the costs involved in different types of political participation. Flexible models allowing for nonlinearities capturing systems 26