Why People Turn to Institutions They Detest: Institutional Mistrust and Justice System Engagement in Uneven Democratic States

Abstract

Does political mistrust lead to institutional disengagement? Much work in political science holds that trust matters for political participation, including recourse to the justice system. Scholars of judicial institutions, relying largely on survey research, argue that low trust decreases legal compliance and cooperation, threatening the rule of law. Legal consciousness and mobilization scholars, meanwhile, suggest that trust does not drive justice system engagement. However, their single-case study approach makes assessing the wider implications of their findings difficult. Based on an innovative comparative focus-group study in two uneven democratic states, Chile and Colombia, we show that trust is not the primary factor driving justice system engagement. Rather, people’s engagement decisions are shaped by their expectations and aspirations for their political system and by their politically constructed capacities for legal agency. Our study offers insights of relevance for analysts of various forms of political participation in uneven democratic states across the globe.

Keywords

law and society trust social capital qualitative methods quality of democracy Latin American politics

As trust in political institutions has eroded in democracies around the world, analysts have expressed concern, even alarm (Mounk, 2018; Zuckerman, 2021). They warn that if people perceive institutions to be dysfunctional, corrupted, rigged, or otherwise unresponsive, they may decide that political participation through institutional channels is a waste of time. Rather than exercise their citizenship, then, they may disengage politically, violently rebel, and/or support authoritarian interventions. In Hirschman’s (1970) classic terms, those who deem voice ineffective will choose some form of exit from the political system.

Scholars of justice institutions (e.g., police and courts) share the concern that eroded political trust will lead to exit from system participation. Based largely on survey research, these analysts contend that individuals who lack trust¹ in the justice system will be less likely to cooperate with or seek recourse through legal institutions (Roberts & Stalans, 1997; Tyler, 2006; Tyler & Huo, 2002) or may avoid the legal system to resolve grievances altogether (Kirk & Papachristos, 2011). Moreover, a number of studies find that low levels of perceived institutional legitimacy are associated with a greater acceptance of or engagement in illegal behavior, including lethal vigilantism (Marien & Hooghe, 2011; Nivette, 2016; Tyler, 2009).² In short, low public trust in the justice system may put the rule of law at risk (Bühlmann & Kunz, 2011; Cann & Yates, 2016; Salzman & Ramsey, 2013).

However, not all analysts agree that mistrust discourages political participation (see Gabriel, 2017; Levi & Stoker, 2000). Some argue that mistrust actually motivates people to engage the system: to get out and vote, become involved in civic organizations, or take to the streets to demonstrate peacefully for change (Booth & Seligson, 2009; Norris, 2011). In regard to justice institutions, scholars of legal consciousness and mobilization have employed qualitative or mixed methods to explore why people in settings of high institutional mistrust will still turn to the justice system to resolve conflicts, remedy harms, or claim rights. Some offer more rationalist accounts based on need, cost/risk, or expected utility (Hendley, 2012, 2017; Taylor, 2018). Others point to emotional or ideational factors to explain recourse to justice institutions in which people have little faith (e.g., Gallagher, 2006; Lake et al., 2016). However, the wider applicability of the findings in these single-country studies remains unclear.

In this article, we draw on an innovative comparative focus group design in two uneven democratic states in Latin America, Chile and Colombia, to examine the relationship between institutional disaffection and institutional engagement, focusing on the justice system. We contend that mis/trust is not the primary factor in decisions to exit or engage justice institutions in either country; rather, people’s engagement decisions are shaped by their political expectations, aspirations, and capacities as democratic citizens. Three main empirical findings support this claim. First, across countries and demographic groups, opinions of the justice system are based on general perceptions of systemic (un)fairness that go beyond how individuals think those institutions would work for people like them in particular situations. They can thus hold and express highly negative opinions of the justice system, in terms of its overall performance, yet use other, separate criteria to make decisions on whether or not to turn to law and justice institutions in specific circumstances. Second, even when people view justice system institutions as generally unfair, corrupt, and inefficient, and when they assess the chances of a successful outcome as unlikely, they are sometimes driven by expectations, indignation, and/or aspirations to turn to the justice system. This finding also holds across countries and demographic groups. Third, while these feelings may incline people to turn to the justice system, they will only do so if they possess basic capacities to do so, including rights consciousness and legal literacy. Such capacities are not evenly distributed across demographic groups within countries, but differences between the capacities of marginalized people in Colombia versus Chile suggest that these capacities are not simply structurally determined; they are also shaped by variations in the political context that empower or disempower citizens.

This study contributes new insights into why people engage justice institutions in which they have such little faith. Our first-of-its-kind comparative focus-group research design, which probed for commonalities and differences across countries and demographic categories, allowed us to uncover factors and patterns that are difficult to apprehend through either survey-based research or single-case studies. Moreover, by defining and examining justice engagement as a form of political participation, we provide original evidence relevant for the broader literature on the origins of political trust and the factors that mediate its relationship with participation, particularly in the large set of “broad but uneven states” (Kruks-Wisner, 2018) that cuts across developed and developing democracies. As many unequal democracies continue to grapple with fulfilling the promise of democracy and justice, this research generates hypotheses that can be further explored in this set of countries in both the “Global North” and “Global South.”

Competing Perspectives on Trust and Justice System Engagement

Most political scientists consider the effects of trust on democratic political participation in terms of voting or engagement in civic organizations, on the one hand, and protests or social movements, on the other (Gabriel, 2017; but see Aytaç & Stokes, 2019). These debates have often overlooked the more quotidian yet fundamentally important actions through which citizens make claims on the state beyond “voting booths and barricades” (Kruks-Wisner, 2018, p. 4). Claim-making “consists of citizen action in pursuit of [public] goods and services...intended to protect and improve the well-being of citizens” and is “integral to active citizenship practice” (Kruks-Wisner, 2018, p. 6 and p. 9). One form of claim-making on the state is what we label justice system engagement, that is, calling upon institutions of law and justice to aid in the peaceful, fair, and effective resolution of conflicts, to secure protection from threats to one’s person or property, or to demand a remedy for a violation of legal rights. Engaging the justice system is a fundamental exercise of democratic citizenship (Brinks, 2009; O’Donnell, 2001), a form of political participation “by which the citizenry uses public authority on its own behalf” and “determine[s] the benefits that [they] actually receive from their government” (Zemans, 1983, p. 690 and p. 693).³

Numerous scholars have studied the relationship between institutional trust and various forms of political participation. Based mainly on survey research, the literature offers two “different, and incompatible” arguments regarding the relationship between trust and participation (Levi & Stoker, 2000, p. 486; see also Gabriel, 2017; Van der Meer, 2017). The first claim is that higher levels of trust in state institutions fuel political participation, such as voting, involvement in political campaigns, or other forms of conventional system engagement, while distrust discourages such participation (Dalton, 2004; Finifter, 1970; Norris, 2011; Stokes, 1962) and leads people to pursue alternative forms of political action, such as protest or violence (Crozier et al., 1975; Gurr, 1970; Marien & Hooghe, 2011; Norris, 2011). The second, opposing claim is that distrust actually stimulates political involvement “at least...among those who feel politically efficacious” (Levi & Stoker, 2000, p. 486, referring to Gamson, 1968; 1975; Shingles, 1981). Following the work of Norris (2011), this has come to be known as the “critical citizens” argument, according to which individuals who ascribe low levels of legitimacy to institutions do not disengage from politics, but participate actively (e.g., Booth & Seligson, 2009 on Latin America). Overall, survey-based empirical results on the relationship between trust and various forms of political participation, whether national or cross-national, have been inconsistent and contested (Gabriel, 2017).

In the specific literature on institutional trust and behavior around legal institutions, however, there is a more consistent claim, namely, that “the more trustworthy citizens perceive government to be, the more likely they are to comply with or even consent to its demands and regulations” (Levi & Stoker, 2000, p. 491). Through survey studies in the United States and Western Europe, scholars have shown that people’s assessments of the fairness of the procedures to which they are subjected by police and/or courts shape trust in those institutions and that this trust motivates individuals’ compliance and cooperation with justice system actors and institutions (Hough et al., 2013; Tyler, 2006, 2009; Tyler & Huo, 2002; Tyler & Jackson, 2014; ). A related line of work finds that where people are cynical about the law, they will avoid turning to the justice system to resolve grievances (e.g., Kirk & Papachristos, 2011).

Socio-legal studies on legal consciousness,⁴ however, argue that the relationship between trust in justice system institutions and people’s engagement with those institutions is more complex than the political trust literature allows. Drawing mainly on ethnographic studies of small communities in the United States, legal consciousness scholars have shown that individuals hold polyvocal, heterogeneous, contradictory, and contingent views of law and courts (Hull, 2003; McCann, 1994; Merry, 1990; Nielsen, 2004; Sarat, 1990) and that “an economic, cost-benefit, rational calculus” cannot “adequately describe” the way people understand and approach the justice system (Silbey, 2005, p. 339). Merry’s seminal study of legal consciousness among working-class Americans in Massachusetts (1990), for example, shows that people take their problems to courts because of a consciousness of rights and a sense of entitlement. That is, “Despite their recognition of their unequal power, they nevertheless think they are entitled to the help of the court [as members of a legally ordered society]" (p. 2). Many other works in the socio-legal literature link rights consciousness to structural factors, arguing that those with higher socio-economic status, education, and/or racial and gender privilege will conceive of themselves as legally entitled rights bearers and frame their problems in rights terms, while marginalized people likely will not (Bumiller, 1987; Nielsen, 2000; Sandefur, 2008).

While most of the work discussed to this point has been conducted in the United States and Western Europe, in recent years political scientists have begun to investigate the extent to which these claims hold in other contexts. Examining justice system engagement in non-Western countries and the Global South, these works have found that individuals may turn to the formal legal sphere to resolve disputes and/or claim rights despite deep mistrust of legal institutions (Gallagher, 2006; Hendley, 2012, 2017; Lake et al., 2016; Smulovitz, 2010; Taylor, 2018).

With the relevance of institutional trust called into question, these works have sought to identify other explanations for why individuals turn to the justice system. Some offer largely rationalist accounts. Hendley (2012, 2018), for example, finds that in Russia, a mix of need (intensity) and capacity (experience with and knowledge of courts) drives engagement with judicial institutions in civil disputes. She shows that ordinary Russians make strategic decisions about legal recourse based on calculations about “cost, time, energy, and emotional sacrifices” when dealing with people like themselves (Hendley, 2018, p. 40), avoiding it altogether in cases involving powerful political or bureaucratic interests (Hendley, 2017, p. 224). With a similar accent on need, Taylor argues that in Colombia, where people have a poor opinion of the justice system, people make high use of the “tutela” procedure to make claims for constitutionally protected rights because they view it “as the one possible way to resolve their problems” (Taylor, 2018, p. 364). Other scholars highlight the relevance of emotional or ideational factors, such as people’s self-conceptions as legal agents, in explaining engagement with the justice system. In her study of workers’ use of legal aid services in China, Gallagher finds that, even when plaintiffs walk away disappointed and frustrated from experiences in the courts, they nonetheless remain determined to assert their newfound legal agency and feelings of efficacy going forward as “critical citizens, taking the state to task for [legal system] failures and problems” (2006, p. 788). Lake et al. (2016) found a similar determination among Congolese victims of gender-based violence who vowed to turn to the courts to see “the harms they experienced...formally acknowledged and sanctioned, even if the actual process delivered nothing of what they hoped” (p. 562.)

These qualitative and mixed-methods studies offer compelling explanations for why disenchantment with justice institutions does not necessarily lead to “despondency” (Gallagher, 2006) or to “legal nihilism” (Hendley 2012, 2018), and they speak to the importance of paying attention to “the role of largely unknown contextual factors as mediators between trust and participation” (Gabriel, 2017, 238). However, because they are focused on single countries, it is impossible to assess what these arguments tell us beyond their country-specific contexts. What implications do they have for other countries where trust in justice institutions has eroded or stagnated? Will citizens make rational calculations to disengage from institutions they detest, resigning themselves to live with injustice or perhaps exacting private revenge on those who wrong them? Or are there other, less economistic reasons they might have for continuing to turn to the justice system despite their dim view thereof?

Research Design

To address these questions, we designed an innovative comparative focus group–based study that offers a mid-level, qualitative analysis, between the (sub-)national and cross-national survey-based literature, on the one hand, and case studies, on the other. By applying a common script across socially salient categories of participants in two different national contexts, we gained deeper, dialogical understandings of the opinions and decision-making processes of respondents—which surveys, by their nature, miss—while using a comparative lens that allowed us to observe country-level trends not usually possible with more ethnographic studies.

Case Selection

To examine how institutional mistrust affects citizens’ engagement with the justice system, we selected cases from an ample category that Kruks-Wisner labels “intermediate states”: “broad” in scope, reach, and visibility, but “uneven'' in performance and accessibility (2018, p. 52). In such cases, making claims on the state is not dangerous or futile as it might be in a failed or predatory state, nor is it straightforward, low-cost, or likely to pay off, as it might be in a more advanced and egalitarian institutional setting. Latin America has been recognized as having numerous countries that fall into this “intermediate” category, where the reach and performance of state institutions, including law and justice institutions, vary both geographically and across social strata (O’Donnell, 1993). Yet, even in parts of Latin America where institutional performance is relatively good, or has improved in recent decades, trust in justice system institutions is consistently low (Latinobarómetro, 2017). The region thus presents a good laboratory for exploring the relationship between institutional trust and justice system engagement.

Within this regional context, we opted for a most different comparative case study of Chile and Colombia that allowed us to hold constant low levels of trust in the justice system⁵ in settings of high socio-economic inequality⁶ and introduce variation in the political and institutional environments in which individuals live (George & Bennett, 2005). Chile and Colombia are at opposite ends of political and institutional spectrums in several ways. After a brutal, seventeen-year military dictatorship that stamped out civil society, Chile became a stable, safe democracy with relatively uniform state presence throughout its territory (Clavel 2018). Chile continues to be governed by a constitution, written during Pinochet’s dictatorship,⁷ that is anchored in neoliberal political and economic principles, and which judges faithfully interpret to offer minimal protection for socio-economic rights (Brinks, 2012; Couso, 2011). Colombia, in contrast, has experienced violent conflict since the 1950s, involving left-wing insurgents, state-sanctioned paramilitaries, and an active civil society. This has rendered Colombia one of the most violent states in the region and its institutional presence and capacity vary widely within its territory (García & Espinosa, 2013). In an effort to provide channels for long-excluded voices within the political system, Colombia adopted a new, progressive constitution in 1991 that established a “social democratic rule of law”; granted extensive civil, political, and socio-economic rights; and established an autonomous Constitutional Court which is now considered one of the “most active and powerful courts in the entire region” (Brinks, 2012, p. 576).

The constitutional differences have important effects on citizens’ civic education. Colombia’s 1991 Constitution establishes education as a duty of the state that should respect human rights, peace, and democracy (Art. 67). Since the 1990s, Colombian governments have implemented national programs to train government staff on human rights and produced pedagogical materials distributed to teachers. In addition, in the last decade, civil society organizations have promoted and organized training actions on rights knowledge and claiming (Min. Educación, 2014). By contrast, there is no educational policy on human rights in Chile, and, while from 1981 to 1998, the national high school curriculum included a course on “Civic Education and Economy,” designed for teaching the principles of the (authoritarian-era) 1980 Constitution, as of 1998, Chile is the only Latin American country that does not have a required course in civic education in its national curriculum (Jara, 2019).

Within Chile and Colombia, we conducted our project in Medellín (rather than the capital, Bogotá) and Santiago because these two major cities put in sharp relief the ways in which their respective national contexts differ. Chile’s capital Santiago lies at the center of this highly centralized state and is heavily segregated along socio-economic lines. In a survey conducted in the city in 2012–13, just 19% of those interviewed evaluated the justice system as “very trustworthy” or “trustworthy” (Libertad y Desarollo, 2013, p. 2). Medellín, in turn, has been at the geographical and political center of Colombia’s decades-long civil war and, as a result, has a large displaced population (GMH, 2013). Colombia’s racial and socio-economic diversity are also reflected in Medellín, where 2.5% of the population is Afro-Colombian,⁸ and violence and poverty coexist alongside Medellin’s economic and political elite. In addition, Medellín has relatively high rates of judicial efficiency and a high concentration of judges (García & Espinosa 2013, 2015). Medellín thus offers a microcosm of the broader social, political, and institutional context of the country. A regular poll conducted by the mayor’s office in 2015 showed levels of confidence in judges and judicial organs in the city to have declined from 17% in 2009 to 11% (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2015, p. 60).

Conducting this novel comparative analysis in these two research sites provides us with the opportunity to explore how both similar structural factors and different political contexts affect the relationship between citizens’ perceptions of the justice system and their engagement with justice institutions in two democracies with broad but unequal states. If low trust led to disengagement or, alternately, stimulated “critical citizen engagement,” we would see this in these two very different institutional environments which share a citizenry with little trust in their judicial systems.

Methodology and Methods

As noted above, much literature on political trust and participation is survey-based. Although surveys have yielded valuable individual-level data, as Cleary and Stokes (2009) contend, surveys ask respondents to evaluate institutions with which they have little to no experience or direct basis for evaluation: “What might it mean for such citizens to say that they trust (or distrust) el poder judicial?” (p. 319). They go on to argue that surveys are not well-suited to exploring the origins and effects of trust on citizens’ decisions on political behavior.

To get at these issues, we opted for a focus group method, defined as when a group of people of similar characteristics “is convened to discuss a set of questions centered on a particular topic or set of topics” (Cyr, 2016, p. 233). Focus groups are an especially effective technique for examining the construction of meaning negotiated by participants in the course of their interactions; observing the range of perspectives about a topic expressed in people’s own words; and understanding how social forces and structures help explain the motivations, attitudes, and beliefs of individuals (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2013; Morgan, 2012; Wilkinson, 1998). Focus groups also provide a corrective to some of the weaknesses of one-on-one interviews: they ask people about their opinions and prospective actions in a social environment amongst their peers, closer to how people make decisions and form opinions; they enable conversations to arise amongst participants which center their thought processes and de-center the researchers’ interventions; and in these conversations, they provide insights into “decision-making processes, including how people assess different priorities and tradeoffs […as they] allow researchers to see how people think, [and] what factors they take into account in making a decision” (Cyr, 2019, p. 11).⁹

We conducted 16 focus groups in Santiago, Chile, and Medellín, Colombia, in August 2017—eight groups in each country with 7–8 participants per group, for a total of 127 participants. Each focus group was composed of people who shared basic social characteristics (Table 1). This served two purposes: it ensured that participants were in an environment with people somewhat like themselves and could thus feel more comfortable speaking openly, and it permitted us to identify response patterns between and across subpopulations. This illuminated similarities and differences in responses within and across demographic groups, which the socio-legal literature has highlighted, but also across national contexts, which single-country studies cannot capture.
Table 1.
Focus Group Composition¹².

Women Men

Chile High-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-3) High-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-1)

High-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-4) High-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-2)

Low-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-6) Low-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-5)

Low-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-7)¹³ Low-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-8)

Colombia Afro-Colombian (COL-2) Afro-Colombian (COL-1)

High-income (COL-4) High-income (COL-3)

Displaced (COL-6) Displaced (COL-5)

Low-income (COL-8) Low-income (COL-7)

We recruited groups by sex and class but also took into account contextual categories.¹⁰ In Chile, because of the impact that the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship had on the life experiences of those who lived through it, we also organized the groups by age, with four groups of people between 25 and 35, and four of 40 to 60-year-olds. In Colombia, the Latin American country with the second largest Afro-Latinx population after Brazil, we included two groups of Afro-Colombians.¹¹ Since Colombia’s armed conflict has led to more than seven million people, over 10% of the population, being forcibly displaced within the country (GMH 2013), we also included two groups of internally displaced people.

In both research sites, we applied the same focus group instrument. After an initial “ice-breaking” exercise to build rapport, we presented two hypothetical (but plausible) scenarios, in which a fictional protagonist (Claudia or Fernando) experienced a rights violation.¹⁴ We adjusted the demographic characteristics of the fictional protagonist of each scenario to mimic the characteristics of each group. In each scenario, we built in an escalation in the gravity of the harm, allowing us to probe whether a more serious offense would produce different responses.¹⁵ At each step, we asked what participants thought the fictional protagonist could and should do. We opted for this strategy, rather than ask people directly about their experiences with the justice system, so that the participants did not feel the need to reveal or defend their own behavior (see Hendley, 2017, p. 68). Our objective was to prompt responses regarding what options participants perceived for people like themselves when faced with the kinds of conflicts we described. Interestingly, however, these hypotheticals frequently elicited voluntary accounts of participants’ experiences, and they often slipped into first-person responses (e.g., “I did x” or “I would do y”). Our data thus include hypothetical and reported behavior, as well as information on participants’ experiences with the justice system.

The first scenario proposed a conflict with a neighbor over noise. The escalation was a threat made by the neighbor against the fictional protagonist. In the second scenario, a family member of the protagonist was falsely accused of theft, arrested, and jailed by the police. The escalation was physical abuse by the police, evidenced by bruises on the body of the detained relative (after their release). During the discussion of these scenarios, participants were not primarily asked about justice system institutions. Rather, we asked participants about how they would resolve these scenarios in general terms, allowing justice institutions and authorities to emerge spontaneously in the discussion.

After the first two scenarios were discussed, we directly probed participants’ opinions and perceptions of their country’s justice system. Instead of asking about specific justice system actors and institutions, we started this section with the general question of what, in one word, was their opinion of their country’s justice system. This is the same question that surveys ask, but without pre-existing, standardized response categories. This question allowed us to observe the range of opinions that emerged from participants and also, through follow-up questions, to identify the different actors and institutions that participants attached to these opinions. Finally, we asked participants to reflect on where those perceptions originated, and what they felt might help improve the system. At that stage, we were able to go back and reference things that had come up in the discussions around the scenarios, asking participants to specify or clarify what they meant, or grapple with contradictions in the conversation. The focus groups lasted between two and three hours and were transcribed in Spanish. To systematically analyze our focus group data, we used the software NVivo, which supports researchers in organizing, coding, querying, and visualizing qualitative data as well as in managing the knowledge generated in the data analysis process (Bazeley, 2007, pp. 2–3).¹⁶

Why Do People Turn to Institutions They Detest? Findings

Our focus groups showed unequivocally that people who hold highly negative perceptions and opinions of the justice system are not necessarily discouraged from engaging that system in the face of harm or rights violations. We designed our focus group instrument so that the segments on behavior in hypothetical scenarios came first, so as to avoid “priming” participants to think about their feelings about the justice system. We thus were able to gather extensive data on what they or someone like them could/should do in the face of harm or rights violation and why; to ask what they thought would be the likely outcome; and then, later, when we asked their opinions of the justice system, to ask them why those seemed at odds with much of what they had said in the earlier, behavioral-focused segments of the exercise.

In both Chile and Colombia, when asked to offer one word to describe their country’s justice system, participants across all social categories unanimously expressed negative opinions. In Chile, the most mentioned words were bad, unjust, and slow, and in Colombia, the words people mentioned the most were corrupt/corruption, bad, and unjust (Figure 1).¹⁷
Figure 1.
Word clouds of most common words used to describe the justice system.

However, these ubiquitous and overwhelmingly negative perceptions did not correspond to what people said regarding justice system engagement in the earlier segments of the focus group. Indeed, when asked what the fictional protagonist could or should do in the hypothetical scenarios, many participants explicitly mentioned the “legal way” or “legal means” as one of the first possible actions. We coded participants’ responses in the focus group using three types of hypothetical or reported behavior: justice system engagement, pro-social alternatives, or exiting. In both countries, justice system engagement, such as turning to courts, the police, and other justice-related institutions, was the most frequent response, coded a total of 489 times throughout all the focus groups (Table 2)¹⁸. Pro-social alternatives, such as direct conciliation with the neighbor or doing a parallel investigation, were coded 288 times, while exiting the system was coded 220 times.
Table 2.
Frequency of Coded References to Different Behaviors.

Behavior Category Total Frequency Chile Colombia

Justice system engagement N/A 489 231 258

Pro-social alternatives Individual 171 104 67

Collective 117 77 40

Exit Resign 135 66 69

Vigilantism 85 42 43

These references were made not only in hypothetical terms, but also as reported behavior in analogous situations. For example, in the scenario regarding the noisy neighbor, a participant from CHI-6 stated: “I would start by calling the police, because that happened to me … I went and knocked on the door and they shut the door in my face. So if there is no dialog, no understanding, if those people have no good will to work it out, it has to be all legal...via the justice [system]”. Colombian participants from different groups gave similar responses: “I would tell Fernando that now the justice [system] has a new procedural code for those cases and that he [should] bring the case to the justice [system]...now there are fines, now the police can even enter, confiscate the equipment and take it away” (COL-3); “He should invoke the police code...that’s why they issued it. … If he spoke directly to him...and it didn’t work, then [he should invoke] the code that just went into effect on the first [of this month]” (COL-7).

In the hypothetical scenario of false arrest, many participants agreed that they should file a legal claim against the police. Indeed, participants suggested recourse to state institutions in 170 instances. A participant from CHI-2 recounted that in the face of a similar situation to this scenario, he had turned to the courts: “[the police] detained me all night. And they released me the next day. Obviously I made a claim against the police.” This experience was echoed by a participant from COL-1 who saw his friend being unjustifiably arrested by the police: “so I said [to a policeman] ‘do you have evidence that he was one of the robbers?’ and he said ‘no, [but] he was there’... immediately he got arrested … and I immediately went to make the claim.” In response to the escalation of police abuse, a participant from COL-4 said she would turn to “the public prosecutor’s office and would expose the case and I imagine they would then send me to the forensic medical office.” Several participants in COL-5 said, “I report it”; “Sue”; and “Sue, yes, because they can’t beat a prisoner.” There was similar agreement in CHI-3 who immediately responded “I [would] report it”; “Me, too!”; and “I [would] sue.”

As these data show, across countries and social categories, negative perceptions do not translate to disengagement. We thus join the chorus of works in comparative politics that argue that citizens’ proclivity to use these institutions are independent of their expressed trust therein (Gallagher, 2006; Hendley, 2012, 2017; Lake et al., 2016; Taylor, 2018). But why in contexts of low trust in justice institutions are citizens still willing to turn (or have actually turned) to them when faced with harm or rights violation? We contend that, in uneven democratic states, people’s decisions about whether or not to seek recourse from the justice system are not simply made in cost-benefit terms, but are powerfully shaped by their political expectations, aspirations, and capacities as citizens. In the remainder of this section, we present the three main empirical findings that support this claim.

Democratic Expectations and Popular Mistrust of Justice Institutions

The first answer that our study provides to the question of why negative perceptions of the justice system do not correspond to disengagement is that, when asked to assess justice institutions, people in both countries consider how fairly and effectively they perceive such institutions to work in general, regardless of whether they think particular justice institutions have worked or would work for people like them in specific cases. In other words, they look at the big picture of (perceived) system performance, rather than making a narrowly self-referential evaluation. In doing so, they do not differentiate their opinions of judicial institutions from those of other government institutions. Rather, they assess the legislature, executive, and judiciary together in terms of how well/poorly they meet democratic standards of fairness.

Regardless of their socio-economic level, their sex, and their age, participants in our Chilean focus groups shared a view that the system works differentially for powerful people (in the form of money and networks) than it does for others: “The justice system is not equal for everyone,” stated a participant from CHI-4. “Social status affects what happens to you,” said a member of CHI-8. “We all see what happens when an executive gets arrested… We all know he will be released,” but “if you are poor, you are screwed,” mentioned a participant from CHI-2 and a participant from CHI-1, respectively. Indeed, some of them distinguished explicitly between turning to institutions in a particular hypothetical case, which they discussed in the early segments of the focus group around the hypothetical scenarios, and their opinion about the justice system in general, which we asked them after wrapping up the discussion of the hypotheticals. A participant from CHI-1 mentioned that “Now [during the segment about perceptions of the justice system], we are talking about the justice system at a much bigger level. That system has issues. And it has issues going way back.” As a participant from CHI-3 declared in this latter segment: “You can see that people are disenchanted with everything, with institutions, with the police, with everything because one doesn’t see justice!”

Colombians, too, across social categories, expressed these general opinions that in their country “justice is not administered by the same standards to everyone; it depends on what you have… for example … all of those gentlemen who have high-ranking positions are protected everywhere… ten years in prison for an ordinary person and they get sentenced to eight months in prison… I think it is very unfair” (COL-4). “Colombian justice is so, so, so, so bad, so bad… it does not work, because in fact there is inequality, there is no respect for fundamental rights for all… it works only for [those with] money,” declared a participant from COL-7. In addition, Colombians pointed to the perceived corruption in the system: “Overall, you can buy the law” (COL-8) and “there is a mafia in which the weaker pays the consequences” (COL-1). As a participant from COL-5 summarized, “There are a lot of things, but for me there are three: First, what we said, corruption; second, injustice; third and most importantly, they don’t respect the human being.”

When we asked participants to identify which specific institutions they had in mind when they expressed these negative opinions, we found that in both countries, they applied them across government institutions, often explicitly referencing the “system.” These references to the state apparatus as a whole were as common as references to particular state institutions. During the “in one word” section, we coded 113 references to “the system” (46 times in Chile and 67 times in Colombia). In Chile, some participants mentioned frequently that “the problem here is of all [institutions and actors]” (CHI-6); “all [institutions and actors] are involved” (CHI-2); “it is the whole system” (CHI-8); and “it’s, like, the system that is bad... I’m referring to the authorities in general” (CHI-7). Participants in Colombia also blamed the system with statements such as “I generalize. The justice system as a whole” (COL-8), mentioning often that “the police, the public prosecutor’s office, all are a mob of corrupt people” (COL-4) and that when they express negative opinions, they are thinking about “all the high command… the government, the politicians, the police… all of them” (COL-7).

Disagreements among focus group participants about which institutions merit the scorn they express also reveal that when they are asked their opinion on the justice system, citizens sometimes do not separate the judicial branch from the “political” branches, who make the law. For example, participants in focus group CHI-3 disagreed on which institutions they had in mind: “Participant 6: Those who make the decisions in a trial. The ones who decide... the judges., [...]Participant 4: But [it’s] the law [that] is bad, Participant 5: [It’s] the politicians.” Colombians also expressed such discrepancy: Participant 7: The police, the public prosecutor office, CTI [The Investigative Branch of the Public Prosecutor Office], the police, everything. The judges, the military...everyone…, [...]Participant 6: The politicians, Moderator: The politicians as well?, Participant 7: Yes, of course. They are the most corrupt…they create a code that benefits them so they can screw us over (joderlo a uno)” (COL-8).

In sum, our data provide clear evidence of what people take into account when they assess justice institutions, helping to explain why negative perceptions (measured in surveys as low levels of trust) do not translate into institutional avoidance or withdrawal. Across social groups and countries, two insights emerged: first, it is people’s perceptions of performance of government institutions in providing systemic fairness that inform their opinions about institutions, including the justice system, and second, people do not necessarily evaluate institutions separately, as survey questions about trust in institutions expect (or at least ask) them to do. In other words, when asked what they think of justice institutions, people answer generally, rather than with narrow reference to their own experience, and they make their assessments based on their expectations that, in a democracy, government institutions should perform in a fair and equal manner. However, these systemic-level evaluations (often measured or discussed in terms of “institutional trust”) are not the primary factor at play in decision making regarding justice system engagement in particular situations.

Democratic Expectations and Aspirations Motivate Justice System Engagement

If general assessments of the justice system are not what motivate or discourage recourse thereto, then what does? Analysts coming from an economistic perspective expect that when individuals face a justice need, they will weigh how pressing the need is and/or how likely it is that the justice system will work for them before they decide to invest time, money, and energy in making a legal claim (e.g., Hendley, 2012; 2017; Taylor, 2018; Zemans, 1982). If individuals think they would not get a timely and fair response from the justice system, then why would they turn to the institutions at all? While participants in our study sometimes argued that the expected outcome of turning to the justice system would not be worth the investment of their limited resources, the importance of political expectations and aspirations in motivating people across countries and demographic groups to engage the justice system, irrespective of the expected outcome, was striking, particularly when faced with a rights violation by a state actor. The second hypothetical scenario triggered a deep sense of injustice and citizen indignation among many participants in both countries, propelling them to propose justice system engagement, even if they had little reason to believe it would pay off.

Across countries, participants considered the second scenario to violate the police’s duty to protect them as citizens, prompting them to insist on turning to the justice system to assert their democratic citizenship.¹⁹ In Colombia, participants in different social groups expressed that the duty of state actors is “to protect the citizenry, not abuse it” (COL-1) and “to take care of our rights and integrity…they have no reason to attack any citizen either physically or verbally” (COL-7). They must be held to a high standard and thus must be called out if they abuse their power: “The law applies to them too. We need to demand that… to report it” (another participant in COL-7), “even if we know it will take them years to get a solution” (COL-6). As a participant in COL-3 mentioned, “I think [the report] won’t go anywhere, but I will report as a way to record the evidence, or for my mental health, so I don’t keep feeling like that.”

Some Chilean participants echoed these feelings of indignation in response to the escalation of the second scenario: “I would do the same, file a suit against them! [...] Because the duty of the police is to detain criminals, not beat them. Because there is a justice system that, supposedly, will deal with what everyone did! So it’s out of line to beat them. It seems super unjust to me” (CHI-7). For some participants, this escalation was unacceptable because police abuse was a common practice during the dictatorship, but something which they should not accept under a democratic regime: “Because we’re no longer in a dictatorship. That used to happen before; not anymore, supposedly–supposedly, but it keeps happening” (CHIL-4); “Well, we are of the generation that lived under the military government, where they could get away with those things, where having a policeman grab you and beat you was almost part of the procedure. They would arrest you on suspicion, on suspicion. But, note, those were other times. Things changed, because supposedly we returned to democracy” (CHI-8).

Driven by this indignation, participants explicitly stated that they would make a legal claim, even if they had no belief it would succeed, as an expressive act of democratic citizenship. For example, a participant from CHI-8 immediately responded, “obviously, the first thing to do is report it, but aided and supported by a lawyer; that is what the situation requires.” He made it clear that such use of courts is not necessarily driven by the expected self-regarding consequences of that action: “Many of the actions I take, or I would take, might not achieve absolutely anything. But I think it is important to act so issues don’t get overlooked. At least it sets a precedent.... It’s good to do the exercise...regardless of whether it works.” This same reasoning also came up in Colombia, where participants across groups claimed they would report abuses by the police because, as two participants in COL-1 stated, “this is the protocol,” and a way “to leave precedent that something bad is happening at the police station.” In the focus group COL-4, all the participants said they would file a claim against the police for beating Claudia while she was detained. They disagreed on whether it would lead anywhere, but they all thought that was what she should or they would do. Later, in the segment where we asked what would need to change to make the justice system function well, one of these participants said: “not remaining silent,--take the example of Claudia who filed a claim that she was abused. Who knows how many people have been abused while they were in captivity, it would be 4, 5, 6, 7 people who had reported the same situation, so I think if we stop remaining silent, that would help so much in 30 years, … I mean, breaking the silence could have helped to change the justice system.”

Our focus groups thus made abundantly clear that even in contexts where citizens express little faith in justice institutions, and do not necessarily expect an efficient or effective response therefrom, their democratic expectations and aspirations as democratic citizens will still incline them toward legal recourse when faced with harm or rights violations. Such abuses, in particular when perpetrated by a state actor, trigger a deep sense of injustice and moral indignation, compelling them to turn to justice institutions to express their status and agency as citizens or to ensure that abuses do not go unrecorded. The reasons our focus group participants offered reveal that individuals are often inclined to make claims in the justice system “as a matter of principle...not easily explained by simple economic analysis” (Zemans, 1982, p. 1009). As legal consciousness and mobilization scholars have shown in single-case studies, even marginalized citizens can perceive themselves as legally entitled to turn to justice institutions when they face rights violations, regardless of whether they think it will pay off (Gallagher, 2006; Lake et al., 2016; Merry, 1990). Moreover, and in contrast to what Hendley (2017) finds in Russia, focus group participants in our democratic cases are more, not less, inclined to engage the justice system when facing situations that involve powerful actors, such as the police. This suggests that the political context in which individuals live matters for the type of factors that motivate them to engage justice institutions that they mistrust. Uneven democratic contexts set distinct citizen expectations about how the state should treat them, motivating them to engage the justice system when facing rights violations.

The Necessity of Politically Constructed Capacities to Justice System Engagement

Even if democratic expectations and aspirations give people the motivation to seek redress, however, they may not recognize their experiences as actionable (rights) violations or know where or how to make a legal claim. The importance of these sorts of capacities is well-established in the socio-legal literature (Gallagher, 2006; Gloppen, 2006; Hendley, 2012), and many authors claim that they will be largely structurally determined, such that those with higher socio-economic status, education, and/or racial and gender privilege will know what their legal rights are and how to navigate the justice system, while marginalized people will lack these capabilities (Sandefur, 2008; Zemans, 1982). Yet, our focus groups showed that although wealthier men in both countries boasted the strongest capabilities vis-à-vis the justice system (Gallagher et al., 2019), there were also marked differences between the ways in which Colombians and Chileans in less privileged groups, respectively, talked about their rights and showed familiarity with institutional remedies. This indicates that, even in contexts of prevailing low trust, justice system engagement, especially among marginalized populations, requires not only motivation but also capacities, both constructed through political processes.

One of the benefits of the focus groups method we employed was that in addition to inviting people to respond to hypothetical scenarios in which a fictional protagonist faced a harm or rights violation, the format allowed them to respond and to converse freely, in the first person and based on their experiences. We were thus able to discover not only what people thought someone like them could or should do in specific situations, but also if they knew precisely where to turn and what to do, or what they had or had not done, in analogous circumstances. Through these conversations—in which participants often engaged each other as much or more than the moderators—we observed national differences in participants’ rights awareness, on the one hand, and knowledge of how to navigate the justice system, on the other.

First, Colombians demonstrated a stronger rights consciousness than Chileans. In all the groups, Colombians mentioned the word “right” or “rights” four times more often than their Chileans counterparts (169 mentions vs. 49 mentions) and used it, in the sense of “I have rights,” to interpret the hypothetical scenarios far more than Chilean participants did. A participant from COL-2, for example, labeled the first scenario, of a conflict between fictional neighbors over noise, as one in which “the main character’s rights are being violated”; thus, the participant stated, she should ask for official assistance. When asked what the fictional protagonist could or should do when detained on a false accusation of theft, COL-7 participants agreed that he should contact a lawyer, saying “when you are arrested, you have the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer; it’s the state that offers you that.” Participants from COL-8 also emphasized that, if a relative were beaten while in custody, those without resources could turn to the municipal ombudsmen’s office, stating “There we have rights and they enforce them and assign us a lawyer.”

In contrast, in Chile, we observed a near absence of such rights consciousness. Indeed, the only occasion in which an exchange focused on rights took place was in focus group CHI-5, when one participant shared his experience of being unfairly arrested by the police. Because of his previous but unfinished formal legal training, he said he “knew his rights by the book” and that this knowledge helped him to avoid being further abused by the police. When he related that, upon being detained, he had refused to take off his clothes for a strip search because that action “violates his rights,” the rest of the participants reacted surprised, saying they didn’t know such a request was illegal. He responded, “No guys, they cannot ask you to do that. And that is the law: if you do not want to take your clothes off, they cannot force you, you know what I mean? … If I did not have the education I had, the policeman probably would’ve hit me, he wouldn’t care,…they violate your rights.”

Colombian participants across social categories not only demonstrated a deeper awareness of their rights than did Chileans, but they also showed much more knowledge of what different institutions of the justice system offer. For example, Colombians mentioned the Human Rights Office 52 times: “I would go to the Human Rights Office immediately because [the police] cannot treat you that way” (COL-6); “the Office of Human Rights believes citizens more than they believe the police” (COL-7); and this Office “watches and protects the citizens and watches to see that the entity that provides justice works in a good way” (COL-8). Participants also made many references to the Attorney General’s office and/or the Ombudsman’s office. When discussing the scenario of police brutality, a participant from COL-6 said, “If that happens to me or to my daughter or son, I would not stay silent. I (would) go to Human Rights, the Attorney General, the Ombudsman, everywhere!” A participant from COL-2 noted that the police respond to a chain of command, and so “one who is poor can go to Human Rights or the Ombudsman’s office; they are more specific and they help you more.” Another participant from that same group noted that the municipal Ombudsman’s office “takes care of women, of women’s cases,...so when you have problems, family conflicts, you go there.”

By contrast, Chileans, especially from low-income groups, reported low levels of knowledge on how to navigate the justice system, evident in statements such as, “I told my son we should report [police abuse] but I did not know how, I did not know where to go” (CHI-8). This was emblematic of a more broadly perceived “lack of information … about what procedures should be followed” (CHI-8) in cases of rights violations in Chile. As another participant from CHI-8 put it, “we’re in a bad situation because...I had no idea, for example, that if they arrest you, they have to take you for a physical examination […] we are not informed about that kind of thing,...and it’s good that we are talking about it, because we are realizing that, in reality, we don’t know what to do in a specific situation.” While some participants mentioned some offices such as the Fiscalía or Attorney General and the Corporación de Asistencia Judicial or Judicial Assistance Corporation, a public institution that provides free legal services, they did so much less than Colombians did. Indeed, the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights only came up in one group discussion (CHI-2).

These contrasting examples from the two countries remind us that the exercise of legal agency requires not only democratic expectations and aspirations but also capacities to recognize rights violations and to know where and how to seek remedies. As Kruks-Wisner argues in her work on claim making in rural India, in order to make any claims on the state, “a person must both aspire to make” such claims and have “a set of capabilities” that includes “information about programs and services, as well as procedural knowledge of how to pursue them” (2018, p. 133; see also Gallagher, 2006). The fact that evidence of such basic capacities emerged in focus groups with participants from underprivileged populations in Colombia, but not in Chile, suggests the relevance of political factors. If structural inequality were determinant of capacities for legal agency, as some works contend (e.g., Nielsen, 2000; Zemans, 1982), the focus group discussions would not have registered these differences. These findings suggest that the political and institutional differences between Chile and Colombia, such as rights education and legal literacy campaigns and policies in Colombia, versus their almost complete lack in Chile, have implications for justice system engagement. To be sure, since the ratification of the 1991 Constitution, and as part of the continuing strategy to end the civil conflict and address its consequences, marginalized citizens in Colombia have been exposed to more political interventions aimed at augmenting their competence to exercise their legal agency and engage justice institutions than have their counterparts in Chile.

Conclusion

Justice system engagement is a form of political participation, and, like other forms of claim-making, it is an essential element of democratic citizenship. In the exercise of their legal agency, citizens participate in the implementation and enforcement of the law, activating the legal system to protect and advance their rights and interests vis-à-vis the state and their fellow citizens. A common claim in the literature is that distrust of courts, based on negative perceptions “of poor performance, delays and backlogs, corruption and bias,” discourages citizens from turning to the justice system (Gloppen, 2006, p. 46). To be sure, declining or stagnating trust in justice system institutions, as with political institutions in general, is often thought to be ominous for the rule of law and democracy. However, the literature, grounded in large-n surveys or single-case studies, contains contradictory claims on whether and why such disaffection is demobilizing or dangerous.

Our comparative focus group study in the low trust contexts in two uneven democratic states reveal that justice system engagement has less to do with people’s trust assessments than it does with their political expectations and aspirations about how democracy should work and with the capacities their political context provides to enable the exercise of their legal agency. Three specific findings support this argument. First, across social categories and countries, people’s trust assessments of justice institutions reflect their perceptions of how fairly the democratic system functions in general and are largely separate from their considerations about turning to the justice system in particular instances. Second, in certain instances, people across countries and social groups do not simply consider the expected utility of engaging justice institutions. When faced with rights abuses committed by state actors, their expectations and aspirations for how a democratic system should work spur them to engage the justice system, to put official abuses on the record, and to reaffirm their agency as citizens—even when they do not anticipate effective redress. Third, even when people express such expectations and aspirations, engagement requires knowledge and capacity. Structures of inequality enable some and exclude others, but differences across countries suggest that the national political context is key for empowering citizens, especially those from underprivileged groups, to engage with the justice system.

This study not only contributes new perspectives on the relationship between trust and justice system engagement, but also provides insights for the broader literature on trust and political participation and points to fruitful avenues for future research. First, our findings are relevant for survey-based work on political trust both as an independent and dependent variable. Our focus groups provide evidence, for example, that citizens tend to make a global assessment of how political institutions work together (Caldeira, 1986; Gibson, 2008; Norris, 1999), rather than having a distinct basis for evaluations of “partisan” institutions and “law and order” institutions (Rothstein & Stolle, 2008) and that it is people’s perceptions of systemic inequality and/or corruption that inform their trust assessments (Uslaner, 2017; Zmerli & Castillo, 2015). Moreover, while our findings support arguments that eroded trust in government institutions will not necessarily discourage political participation, our qualitative data, in the form of people’s own words, cast doubt on claims that low trust itself triggers participation by “critical citizens” (Norris, 2011).

Second, our findings suggest that we must pay greater attention to “the social, psychological, and moral compulsions” that drive political participation of different types (Aytaç & Stokes, 2019, p. 5), including justice system engagement. Our study indicates that, as with other forms of political participation, people turn to justice institutions for reasons related “to the well-being of others as well as oneself, and to processes, not just outcomes” (Wood, 2003, p. 19). This reasoning may be related not only to an immediate “pleasure of agency” (Wood, 2003, p. 19), but also to a desire to take action that might help others to obtain justice in the future (Gallagher, 2006; Lake et al., 2016).

Third, we contend that future studies of different types of political participation should cross-fertilize each other, not just within political science (Aytaç & Stokes, 2019), but also across disciplines and geopolitical regions. Our work demonstrates the importance of cross-national qualitative work for unpacking abstract concepts like political trust and political institutions and to sussing out how individuals make political decisions. Our findings on two uneven democracies in the “Global South” echo those of some socio-legal studies conducted in the United States (Merry, 1990), showing that divisions between “developed” and “developing” democracies may have outlived their usefulness. While we do not argue for a general theory of political participation, we contend that our findings from conversations with citizens of Medellín and Santiago have relevance for a broad swath of cases that Kruks-Wisner (2018) characterizes as intermediate states—countries in which the “the state is central to citizens’ lives” (p. 52) but its performance is irregular and unequal within the territory and across social groups (O’Donnell, 1993). Our insights might thus be instructive for scholars from India to Mexico, from Brazil to the United States, and from the United Kingdom to South Africa. Overall, more multidisciplinary research is needed that bridges different fields and breaks down historic divisions between democracies.

Finally, our focus groups suggest that political interventions, whether state- or society-led, can empower otherwise marginalized people, affecting their perceived options for redressing harms and claiming rights. Future research should inquire into the specific political factors and mechanisms that shape individuals’ rights consciousness and practical knowledge to engage the justice system. Such research will also contribute to a more “people-centered” approach to access to justice, inviting policymakers to complement institutionally focused reforms with initiatives aimed at empowering citizens to exercise their legal agency (Hilbink & Salas, 2021; Task Force on Justice, 2019).

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-cps-10.1177_00104140211024299 – Supplemental Material for Why People Turn to Institutions They Detest: Institutional Mistrust and Justice System Engagement in Uneven Democratic States

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-cps-10.1177_00104140211024299 for Why People Turn to Institutions They Detest: Institutional Mistrust and Justice System Engagement in Uneven Democratic States by Lisa Hilbink, Valentina Salas, Janice K. Gallagher and Juliana Restrepo Sanín in Comparative Political Studies

	Women	Men
Chile	High-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-3)	High-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-1)
High-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-4)	High-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-2)
Low-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-6)	Low-income, 25–35 years old (CHI-5)
Low-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-7)¹³	Low-income, 40–60 years old (CHI-8)
Colombia	Afro-Colombian (COL-2)	Afro-Colombian (COL-1)
High-income (COL-4)	High-income (COL-3)
Displaced (COL-6)	Displaced (COL-5)
Low-income (COL-8)	Low-income (COL-7)

Behavior	Category	Total Frequency	Chile	Colombia
Justice system engagement	N/A	489	231	258
Pro-social alternatives	Individual	171	104	67
Collective	117	77	40
Exit	Resign	135	66	69
Vigilantism	85	42	43

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the focus group participants who gave generously of their time and shared personal and sometimes painful stories. The authors thank Bridget Marchesi, Isabel Arriagada, Monica Delgado, Jennifer Natoli, and Vania Villanueva for research assistance, and Bianet Castellanos, Christina Ewig, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Yanilda González, Kathie Hendley, Jessica López-Lyman, Lindsay Mayka, Lisa Miller, Lorena Muñoz, and Whitney Taylor for helpful comments on previous drafts. We would also like to thank Professors Mary Gallagher (University of Michigan) and Daniel Brinks (The University of Texas at Austin) for serving as Comparative Political Studies guest editors for this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was made possible by funding from the Human Rights Initiative of the University of Minnesota (IRB STUDY00000744) and the Initiative for Multi-Disciplinary Research Teams at Rutgers University-Newark (IRB 18-026M).

ORCID iD

Lisa Hilbink

Supplementary Material

Supplementary material for this article is available online at the CPS website

Notes

Author Biographies

Lisa Hilbink is Associate Professor of Political Science and a member of the Human Rights Faculty at the University of Minnesota. She researches law and courts in democracy and democratization, with a focus on Latin America and Iberia.

Valentina Salas is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on law and society in Latin America.

Janice K. Gallagher is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. She has done extensive research on legal mobilization and institutional responsiveness in Colombia and Mexico.

Juliana Restrepo Sanín is Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at the University of Florida. She specializes in gender and politics in Latin America.

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