A Tale of a Failed Recovery: Ecuador’s Democratic Stagnation

Paolo Moncagatta and Mateo Pazmiño

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2024, vol. 712, issue 1, 137-151

Abstract: Ecuador experienced a dramatic process of democratic backsliding during Rafael Correa’s decade-long administration, which began in 2007. The Correa administration brought plebiscitary overrides and constitutional reengineering that made the government a hyperpresidential one, weakening political institutions and undermining basic civil liberties. When Correa left power in 2017, Ecuador’s democracy recovered; but, even with the promise of an enduring democratic future, the country has not been able to consolidate a functioning representative democratic regime, and new processes of backsliding have occurred. A combination of weak political institutions, poor democratic culture, and major threats to political stability—including the infiltration of organized crime into the political arena—seems to have stagnated Ecuador at the status of a low-quality delegative democracy.

Keywords: democratic backsliding; executive aggrandizement; plebiscitary override; hyperpresidentialism; delegative democracy; democratic stagnation; Ecuador (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027162241312518 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:712:y:2024:i:1:p:137-151

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241312518

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().