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• Democratic decision-making in land reform improves villagers' trust for town and county cadres. • Mass participation in land reform decision-making improves villagers' trust towards village cadres. • This participatory democracy helped decrease unresolved inter-village land disputes, but no such impact on within-village disputes. • Democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for the poorer and politically disadvantaged. • Attention should be placed further to grassroots democracy and village autonomy. This study explores how the application of democratic rule in land reform decision-making determines villagers' political trust towards different levels of the government in China. Analyzing a two-period household survey dataset, we find that in China's recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform, which has devolved the tenure rights of the village collective-owned forestland to households, democratic decision-making increases trust for town and county cadres. The impact on trust towards village cadres is significant only when democracy involves all villagers in a village. We show two mechanisms that improve villagers' trust: the "privatization" effect, where democratic decision-making leads to more land devolved to villagers, and the "conflict-resolving" effect, where improved information and cohesion by mass participation helps resolve inter-village land disputes. Heterogeneity analyses show that democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for villagers with lower income, and those without affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party or village committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]