Government performance, political trust, and satisfaction with democracy in Venezuela, 2016–2017

Since 2015, Venezuela has been home to numerous protests, instigated mostly by people's discontent with the government and its public services. Despite the seriousness of these protests, limited studies have examined the Venezuelans’ evaluation of their government and democracy, and only a few of these studies have used quantitative analysis. To fill this gap, this article offers a snapshot of the ongoing crisis using the Americas Barometer survey data collected between 2016 and 2017. We first identified Venezuelans’ three main concerns during this time—shortage of food and necessities, economic crisis, and crime—and examined their relationships with the respondents’ trust in government and satisfaction with democracy. We found that shortages of food and necessities and increasing crime were negatively associated with Venezuelans’ trust in their government (although shortages were a more significant factor than crime). The long-standing problem of economic crisis was not a significant factor in people's trust in the government. Furthermore, these three factors were not directly linked to Venezuelans’ satisfaction with democracy, but people who showed low levels of trust in government tended to have low satisfaction levels with Venezuelan democracy. Our results invite future studies to compare different times and contexts in Venezuela's ever-changing political landscape.