Forgotten but Expected: Institutional Trust Configurations and the Anticipation of a Future Pandemic in Post-COVID Chile

Background: Three years after the acute phase of COVID-19, it remains unclear whether pandemic experience left a durable imprint on civic attitudes in Latin America, and which citizens continue to anticipate a recurrence. This study examines how latent configurations of institutional trust relate to the expectation of a future pandemic in Chile. Methods: We analysed the Chilean subsamples of two independent Latinobarómetro cross-sections (2018, n = 1200; 2023, n = 1200). Latent class analysis was applied to eight harmonised, dichotomised institutional trust indicators in each wave, with class enumeration based on the Bayesian information criterion, entropy, interpretability, and a parametric bootstrap likelihood ratio test. Weighted logistic regression modelled pandemic expectancy on class membership, with bootstrap standard errors. Results: A three-class solution was retained in both waves: diffuse trust, selective political distrust, and generalised distrust. Distrust declined for the electoral authority (−16.2 pp, p < 0.001), the church (−13.0 pp, p = 0.001), and the police (−10.7 pp, p = 0.011), while remaining stable or rising for representative institutions. No respondent named the pandemic as the country’s main problem in 2023, yet 69.2% expected another pandemic. Expectancy was non-monotonic across classes, peaking in the selective political distrust class (78.8%) rather than the generalised distrust class (61.8%). Conclusions: At the population level, pandemic memory and pandemic expectancy appear to have come apart. The non-monotonic gradient is inconsistent with the pattern predicted by a fatalism account of risk anticipation. Because the inter-wave interval spans both the 2019 social uprising and the COVID-19 pandemic, the repeated cross-sectional design cannot attribute attitudinal change to the pandemic specifically, and the findings are best read as descriptive of the post-pandemic period rather than as pandemic effects.