Can crime victimization affect support for democracy through its effect on satisfaction with democracy? Drawing upon AmericasBarometer data representative of eighteen Latin American countries, this study answers this question by employing an identification strategy that deals with two strong limitations to causal inference with observational data: covariate imbalance between treatment and control groups and unobserved confounders bias. This strategy combines matching, a novel estimation for mediation analysis, regression-with-residuals, sensitivity analyses, and tests that rule out the possibility of reverse causality. […]

Studies on democratic attitudes in Latin America indicate that older citizens are more likely to express a preference for democracy. This contradicts part of the literature, which suggests that the greatest support should come from younger generations, who were socialized under democratic regimes. One possible explanation for the greater support for democracy among the older generation is that they experienced the repression of political and civil rights under authoritarian rule, thus creating an aversion to such regimes. In this article, […]