Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-11-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, institutional, politics
No skill in my available set matches this task (it's not an ODA proposal/report, PPT, meeting report, or call-record citation), so per the memory instruction I'm noting that and proceeding directly.
Public confidence in judicial institutions has become one of the most closely watched barometers of democratic resilience across Latin America, a region where courts have repeatedly been called upon to adjudicate contested elections, rule on presidential impeachments, and check executive overreach even as several governments have drifted toward illiberal practices. A new article forthcoming in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, titled "Between Democracy and Authoritarianism: Identity Profiles of People Who Trust the Judiciary in Latin America," intervenes directly in this debate. The piece challenges the conventional assumption, widespread in comparative politics scholarship, that trust in the judiciary is simply a subset of generalized institutional trust and therefore a straightforward proxy for the health of democracy. At a moment when judiciaries in countries such as Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, and El Salvador have been drawn into high-stakes political confrontations, understanding who actually trusts the courts, and why, carries direct implications for how analysts read these conflicts.
The article's central argument is that confidence in the judiciary is internally heterogeneous rather than a single, uniform attitude. Using latent class analysis on 2023 survey data, the authors identify distinct "identity profiles" among people who report trusting the judiciary, suggesting that this trust is held by analytically separable groups with different underlying political orientations rather than a homogenous pro-democratic constituency. This is a methodologically significant move: latent class analysis allows researchers to move beyond treating survey respondents as a single population and instead uncover latent subgroups whose patterns of belief differ systematically. The implication is that some individuals may trust courts precisely because they expect those courts to validate authoritarian-leaning projects or protect incumbent power, while others trust courts as guarantors of liberal constitutionalism and checks on executive abuse. If this heterogeneity is confirmed, it would mean that aggregate indices of "judicial trust," long used in regional surveys such as Latinobarómetro, may be conflating fundamentally different political dispositions under a single statistic.
This finding resonates with broader regional trends documented across Latin American political economy research over the past decade. The region has experienced what many scholars term a pattern of democratic backsliding intertwined with selective institutional strengthening, in which courts are simultaneously praised as independent arbiters and criticized as instruments of partisan "lawfare." Judicial trust, in this context, cannot be read as uniformly supportive of democratic norms, since the same institution can be valorized by different political camps for opposite reasons—one side citing a court ruling against a populist executive as proof of judicial independence, the other condemning the same ruling as judicial overreach against popular sovereignty. The article's framing of its findings around the poles of "democracy and authoritarianism" directly engages this tension, implying that some of the people expressing confidence in judiciaries may hold authoritarian-compatible identity profiles, seeing strong judicial intervention as a tool for political control rather than a constraint on it.
For policy audiences and civil society organizations that monitor institutional trust as an early-warning indicator, these findings carry a cautionary methodological lesson: survey instruments that report a single "trust in judiciary" figure risk masking politically consequential divisions within that figure. Organizations designing governance indices, democracy-support programming, or donor-funded institutional reform efforts in Latin America often rely on aggregate trust metrics to calibrate interventions—for instance, judicial reform components within broader rule-of-law assistance portfolios. If trust in courts is, as this study suggests, decomposable into profiles with divergent commitments to democratic versus authoritarian outcomes, then programs aimed simply at "raising judicial trust" could inadvertently strengthen constituencies indifferent or hostile to judicial independence as a democratic safeguard, rather than those committed to it. This argues for more disaggregated survey design and analysis in future monitoring work, and for research institutions like IOCSS to treat regional trust indicators with greater interpretive caution when assessing civil society and governance conditions.
Looking forward, this study opens an agenda for researchers and practitioners alike to interrogate institutional trust data with greater granularity rather than treating it as a self-evident democratic signal. Future comparative work might extend the latent class approach used here to other institutions beyond the judiciary—legislatures, electoral authorities, or the military—to test whether similar identity-based heterogeneity exists across Latin America's institutional landscape, and whether the same respondent profiles recur across institutions or are issue-specific. For practitioners engaged in democracy support, civil society strengthening, or governance assessment in the region, the lesson is to pair quantitative trust indicators with qualitative or structural analysis of what, specifically, respondents believe courts should do with their authority. As Latin American judiciaries continue to be thrust into politically charged roles—adjudicating election disputes, corruption prosecutions, and constitutional challenges to incumbent power—distinguishing between those who trust courts as guardians of democratic constraint and those who trust them as instruments of partisan or authoritarian consolidation will be essential to accurately diagnosing the region's democratic trajectory.