The first talk in our 2025 spring series Public Opinion & Political Behavior in Latin America is with Mollie Cohen (Purdue University).

Trust in core democratic institutions is in decline around the world; Latin America is not immune to this worrying trend. Governments use many tools to shore up citizen confidence in institutions. These include transparency reforms, which permit citizens and the media to observe the government’s work which, in theory, should improve confidence in those processes. Yet, malign actors can use government transparency to undermine citizen trust in democracy. How do reforms that make elections more transparent shape citizens’ trust in elections, and under what circumstances do they backfire? This project examines these questions in the case of Chile, where citizens are empowered to directly observe the vote tally, and where the tally is televised in real time.