Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(1) 3–31
Why People Turn to © The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024299
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Institutional Mistrust
and Justice System
Engagement in Uneven
Democratic States

Lisa Hilbink1 , Valentina Salas1, Janice K. Gallagher2,

and Juliana Restrepo Sanı́n3

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 en-
gagement. However, their single-case study approach makes assessing the
wider implications of their findings difficult. Based on an innovative com-
parative 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

1
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
2
Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA
3
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Lisa Hilbink, University of Minnesota, 1414 Soc Science Bld., 267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN
55455, USA.
Email: hilbink@umn.edu
4 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 in-
stitutional 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 partici-
pation (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 in-
stitutions, scholars of legal consciousness and mobilization have employed
qualitative or mixed methods to explore why people in settings of high in-
stitutional 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).
Hilbink et al. 5

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 in-
stitutions 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 re-
search 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 de-
veloped 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.”
6 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 cit-
izens” 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 gov-
ernment” (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
Hilbink et al. 7

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 re-
lationship between trust in justice system institutions and people’s engage-
ment 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
8 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 constitu-
tionally 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 cal-
culations 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
Hilbink et al. 9

respondents—which surveys, by their nature, miss—while using a compar-

ative 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 im-
proved in recent decades, trust in justice system institutions is consistently low
(Latinobarómetro, 2017). The region thus presents a good laboratory for ex-
ploring 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 in-
troduce variation in the political and institutional environments in which in-
dividuals 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 be-
came 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 insti-
tutional presence and capacity vary widely within its territory (Garcı́a &
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).
10 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 pro-
grams 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 Medellı́n
(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). Medellı́n, 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 Medellı́n, where 2.5% of the
population is Afro-Colombian,8 and violence and poverty coexist alongside
Medellin’s economic and political elite. In addition, Medellı́n has relatively
high rates of judicial efficiency and a high concentration of judges (Garcı́a
& Espinosa 2013, 2015). Medellı́n 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% (Alcaldı́a de Medellı́n, 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 institu-
tional environments which share a citizenry with little trust in their judicial
systems.
Hilbink et al. 11

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 ju-
dicial?” (p. 319). They go on to argue that surveys are not well-suited to ex-
ploring 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 Medellı́n, 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.
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 dic-
tatorship 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
12 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

Table 1. Focus Group Composition12.

Women Men

Chile High-income, 40–60 years old High-income, 40–60 years old

(CHI-3) (CHI-1)
High-income, 25–35 years old High-income, 25–35 years old
(CHI-4) (CHI-2)
Low-income, 25–35 years old Low-income, 25–35 years old
(CHI-6) (CHI-5)
Low-income, 40–60 years old Low-income, 40–60 years old
(CHI-7)13 (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)

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 ac-
cused 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
Hilbink et al. 13

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 discour-
aged 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
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
14 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

Figure 1. Word clouds of most common words used to describe the justice system.

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 al-
ternatives, 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.
These references were made not only in hypothetical terms, but also as re-
ported 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
Hilbink et al. 15

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

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 ca-
pacities 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 per-
ceptions 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
16 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

evaluation. In doing so, they do not differentiate their opinions of judicial in-
stitutions 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, partici-
pants in our Chilean focus groups shared a view that the system works dif-
ferentially 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 dis-
cussion 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
Hilbink et al. 17

“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: “Par-
ticipant 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 mil-
itary...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 per-
ceptions (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 ref-
erence 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
18 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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, par-
ticipants 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 ver-
bally” (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
Hilbink et al. 19

democratic citizenship. For example, a participant from CHI-8 immediately

responded, “obviously, the first thing to do is report it, but aided and sup-
ported 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 re-
maining 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 in-
dignation, 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 in-
stitutions that they mistrust. Uneven democratic contexts set distinct citizen
20 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 experi-
ences. 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 en-
gaged 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 Chil-
eans. In all the groups, Colombians mentioned the word “right” or “rights” four
times more often than their Chileans counterparts (169 mentions vs. 49 men-
tions) 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
Hilbink et al. 21

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 con-
sciousness. 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
22 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 Fiscalı́a 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 as-
pirations 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 dif-
ferences 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
Hilbink et al. 23

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 de-
mobilizing 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 per-
ceptions 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 evalu-
ations 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).
24 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

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 en-
gagement. 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 par-
ticipation 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 partic-
ipation, we contend that our findings from conversations with citizens of
Medellı́n 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” ap-
proach 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).

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
Hilbink et al. 25

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  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5865-2007

Supplementary Material
Supplementary material for this article is available online at the CPS website http://
journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/00104140211024299

Notes
1. Throughout this article, we use “trust” and “confidence” interchangeably, following
Van der Meer (2017).
2. While this article does not engage the concept of legitimacy, we refer to literature
that relies on that concept as an explanatory variable and follow analysts that
accept confidence in an institution as a proxy for the “legitimacy” of that institution
(see Newton, 2007, p. 3).
3. We use justice system engagement rather than Zemans’s term “legal mobilization”
because the scholarship on legal mobilization tends to use it in reference to “the use
of legal strategies by social movements,” and there is disagreement on what types
of individual use of legal institutions fit that concept (Lehoucq & Taylor, 2020, p.
167).
4. Legal consciousness encompasses how people think of themselves relative to the
law (Ewick & Silbey, 1998), what people think law is and is not (Hull, 2003;
Nielsen, 2000), and how these understandings influence whether they conceive
their problems in terms of rights and law.
26 Comparative Political Studies 55(1)

5. In 2017, only 17.1% of Chileans and 21.2% of Colombians say they have “A Lot”
or “Some” trust in the judiciary, compared to 44% in Costa Rica. 24.7% said the
same across 18 Latin American countries (Latinobarómetro).
6. Colombia and Chile have persistently high levels of income inequality, with 2017
Gini coefficients of 49.7 and 46.6, respectively.
7. As of February 2021, Chile is undergoing a constitution-making process initiated
after massive social protests.
8. Only 0.9% of Bogota’s population is Afro-Colombian (DANE, 2018).
9. While we recognize that focus groups “typically lack the generalizability nec-
essary to establish causal claims about the population at large” (Cyr, 2016, p. 250),
their numerous advantages are well suited for addressing our research questions.
10. We did not use experience as an organizing category because we were interested in
understanding the perceptions and behavior of members of the general population.
11. Our participants had to self-identify as Afro-Colombians.
12. In each focus group, we convened participants that shared the main identity
markers by which we designed and labeled each group. However, given resource
constraints, we were not able to control for other identity markers or for inter-
sectional identities (for example, we did not control the income level of Afro-
Colombians).
13. These codes correspond to the (random) order in which the groups were
conducted.
14. We chose harm that could be interpreted as rights violations but did not present
them as such, so that we could see if participants themselves used the language of
rights in the conversation.
15. Hendley (2018) used a similar approach, designed “to ratchet up the complexity of
the problem–in terms of both substance and emotion–as the discussions pro-
ceeded” (p. 42).
16. See Supplementary Appendix for additional information on focus group
methodology.
17. The word clouds were created by an automatic software, based on the “one word”
participants used to describe their country’s justice system. The results show the
most commonly used words and size displays the frequency.
18. To code behavior, we focused on complete ideas expressed by participants or
complete interactions among them. See Supplementary Appendix for details.
19. Across countries, in scenario 2, we found only 15 references to exiting the system,
compared to 170 coded references to the same behavioral category in scenario 1.

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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 Sanı́n is Assistant Professor in the Political Science de-
partment at the University of Florida. She specializes in gender and politics in
Latin America.