11. Conclusions

This chapter reports the main conclusions of this book. It shows the effects of the Criminal Procedure Reform from several perspectives: from the democratisation perspective, it shows how judicial reform had as an effect an increase in public confidence in institutions, facilitating the reform of other areas of government. It also shows that the increases in institutional trust showed different paths for the courts and the police forces, as well as among different publics (gender, age and socio-economic status) and across time, meaning diminution and increase of trust among different groups. In methodological terms, the Criminal Procedure Reform model of implementation constituted a natural experiment, which was used to assess these effects across time using an existing crime survey. The development of a theoretical basis to assess reforms using crime surveys is one of the main contributions of this work. The Chilean Criminal Procedure Reform could be a stone step not only to learn lessons from successful implementation, but also can serve as a model of how to assess the effects of these judicial reforms across developing countries, making use of available data from crime surveys and public opinion data.