States of exception: Unpacking mixed citizen reactions to repression

How does repression affect trust in government? Scholarship on the effects of state violence on political trust has produced conflicting evidence. We argue that one explanation is rooted in differences in the nature of violent repression and citizens’ propensities to engage in motivated reasoning as a function of this violence. Whereas tactics such as political imprisonment reduce political trust, citizens rationalize particularly brutal tactics such as extrajudicial killings as “necessary” to reduce the cognitive discomfort of confronting lethal and irrevocable violence. We tested the argument using disaggregated measures of physical integrity rights violations and survey data from Latin America. We found that trust in the executive hinges on both the type of repressive tactic and prior experience with crime. The study reveals the highly contingent nature of public support for state violence and provides theoretical resources for further probing the psychological foundations of citizen reactions to repression.