The longevity, performance and quality of any democratic society strongly depend on its citizens‘ willingness and ability to agree on basic rules of conflict resolution over differing value priorities. Accordingly, individuals need to tolerate and respect opposing views, develop a certain degree of interest in the common good, abide by the law and engage in political decision making processes and co-operations with fellow citizens. Over the last two decades, social capital research has shown that generalized social trust, a central indicator of social cohesion, is a pivotal ingredient for the development of individual attitudes and orientations described above. While a plethora of empirical studies have thoroughly investigated the origins of social trust, explanations mostly derived from individual level predictors. Notwithstanding, recent empirical evidence suggests that numerous contextual factors impact on peoples’ levels of generalized social trust too. In particular, income inequality is assumed to impair this central indicator of social cohesion. These assumptions have been corroborated by a series of empirical studies that investigate the implications of objective macro-level indicators of income inequality for trust. Much less attention has been paid to the impact of subjectively perceived income inequality and its interplay with objective contextual measures of inequality. In a multilevel research design, this paper aims at scrutinizing how objective and subjective indicators of income inequality affect generalized social trust in Latin American societies, a region where levels of income inequality are particularly and persistently high. The empirical analyses are based on the Latinobarometer surveys and comprise seventeen countries.
