The Trump Election and Attitudes toward the United States in Latin America

Abstract

Did the election of Donald Trump have an immediate effect on trust in the US government in Latin America? While on the campaign trail, the Republican candidate used strong and derogatory language to describe Latin American countries and people and made policy proposals that could deteriorate US-Latin American relations. However, the effect of the Trump election on attitudes toward the United States might be null or minimal if Latin American citizens have strong priors and/or if they do not pay attention to political information. Therefore, it is not clear whether the 2016 election led to a rapid decline in trust in the US government in Latin America. Leveraging the timing of the field implementation of the 2016 wave of the AmericasBarometer in five Latin American countries, we estimate the effect of the 2016 presidential election on respondents’ attitudes using a regression discontinuity design in time. We find that the election of Trump substantively decreased respondents’ trust in the US government.