Ecuador is perhaps the least studied among the Latin American nations that experienced a shift to the left in recent years, despite the fact that the country’s Revolución Ciudadana (Citizens’ Revolution)—developed under the administration of President Rafael Correa—altered its economic, social, and political conditions more significantly than most. The normative and institutional changes, the public policies applied, the ways of conceiving policy, and the consolidation of strong leadership all clearly defined and differentiated this historical period in Ecuadorian history. However, academic research in these areas has been limited. This is evident in the small number of articles and books published (as confirmed in the bibliography of this volume) and in the fact that few have offered a broad panorama of the general process of the Revolución Ciudadana in order to evaluate its results. Little dialogue has focused on the facts of the period as compared to theory, while descriptive explanations predominate. In order to contribute to this debate and fill in gaps in the literature, this book examines Ecuador’s Revolución Ciudadana within the framework of a wider regional process and compares it to other processes developed throughout Latin America.
1 The Ecuadorian Case Within the Latin American Framework
Previous studies are quite diverse and often overlapping, but it is useful to identify four groups that may serve to highlight the particular characteristics of the Ecuadorian case.
The first group of analyses has looked chiefly at the beginning of the process, focusing on the definition, identification, and classification of the various left-oriented governments (Castañeda 2006; Lanzaro 2006; Murillo et al. 2011; Ramos 2017; García Montero et al. 2019; Gargarella 2014; Madrid et al. 2010). Classification criteria include the populist left—institutional left divide, the management of the economy, the relationship with democracy, the position taken in the state/market divide, levels of citizen participation, or the style of government. These approaches have allowed for construction of a multidimensional outlook in which Ecuador’s process would be situated at the populist left, as Carlos de la Torre argues in this volume; and the government of President Correa can be regarded as a regime with authoritarian features, as the chapters by César Montúfar and John Polga-Hecimovich both report. These and other characteristics placed Ecuador in a left wing often denominated ‘Bolivarian’ or ‘21st century socialism’, far from social-democratic tendencies.
Another aspect of interest in comparative studies has been that of institutional innovation. Special attention has been given to constitutional and legal changes in examining the specificities of each case (Sánchez and García Montero 2016; Nolte and Schilling-Vacaflor 2012; Paramio 2006; Arnson et al. 2009; Mayorga 2009; Cameron and Sharpe 2010; Barrios 2017). The Revolución Ciudadana saw a deepening of such reforms, including the installation of a Constituent Assembly, the creation of a new Constitution, and the enactment of nearly 100 laws referring to the constituent elements of the political system. Therefore this represented a process of re-founding that, as a goal of last resort, sought to redefine the very guidelines of civic coexistence. The distinguishing feature, as considered in the chapters by Felipe Burbano de Lara and César Montúfar, was centralism. Such power centralisation was expressed in the concentration of decisions at the national level of government, and in the predominance of a technocratic vision in the formulation of public policies.
A third aspect, highlighted by several comparative studies, is that of the orientation of the policies applied (Weyland 2010, 2011; Levitsky and Roberts 2011; Sánchez and García Montero 2019). The emphasis in this field has been placed on economic and social policies that departed from those previously predominant in Latin America under the so-called Washington Consensus. Although Ecuador was among the countries in which fewer neoliberal measures were applied (compared to, for example, Peru or Argentina). The reforms favored by the successive governments of Rafael Correa was explicitly contrary to that system. The interventionist role assigned to the state, the strong regulations imposed on the private sector, and the inflexibility introduced into certain fundamental variables of the economy were all clear characteristics of the new orientation, as the chapters by Augusto de la Torre, Simón Cueva, and Alexandra Castellanos, by Felipe Burbano de Lara, Matías Bayas-Erazo, and Andrés Mejía, and by Vicente Albornoz all attest. In general, these authors highlight the contradictions between the changes in policy orientation and institutional weakness, thus threatening the continuity of these reforms under an eventual change of government (as proved to be the case).
Another issue examined in studies of left-wing governments is their relationship to the rights and principles of liberal democracy (Molina 2003; Novaro 2006; Panizza 2009a, b; García Montero et al. 2019). There were tensions in the attempts to replace representative democracy with forms of direct and participatory democracy, or in the authoritarian drift of governments and the closing of spaces for free deliberation. In the case of Ecuador, these variables appeared with great force, as observed in practically all the chapters of this volume, especially those by John Polga-Hecimovich, Grace Jaramillo, Carmen Martínez Novo, and César Montúfar. Inevitably, the treatment of this issue is related to the role of leadership, which is sometimes associated with the concept of populism, another object of recent study (De la Torre 2008, 2013; Conaghan 2011; De la Torre and Arnson 2013) addressed in this book in the chapters by Carlos de la Torre and César Montúfar. The concentration of decision-making (and of political action in general) in the office of the President of the Republic—alongside control over all powers of the state—set clear limitations on the liberal and republican components typical of contemporary democracies.
Finally, the role of citizens in relation to their governments has been of interest to authors investigating the characteristics of government–society relations (Luna 2010) and of electoral preferences and ideological outlook (Molina 2003; Borsani 2008; Arnold and Samuels 2011; Basabe and Barahona 2017). These aspects are here approached through the analysis of government policies aimed at specific social groups, such as indigenous peoples and women, in the chapters by Carmen Martínez Novo, Antonio Luis Hidalgo-Capitán and Ana Patricia Cubillo-Guevara, and Marcela Morales. Belén Albornoz also considered these facets, implicitly, when dealing with the politics of science and technology. So did Juan Ponce Jarrín when analyzing certain educational policies, Grace Jaramillo when observing aspects of Ecuador’s foreign policy, and Andrés Mejía and Vicente Albornoz when examining decentralization and state budgets. All these chapters emphasyse the nature of public policies, either as responses to social demands or as impositions from the governmental sphere.
This book takes a comprehensive approach to the analysis of the ‘left turn’ process. In each chapter, sufficient theoretical contributions are given and empirical evidence is presented to allow comparisons and inferences with other Latin America countries that moved to the left.
2 Democracy and the Revolución Ciudadana
Throughout the book, authors make reference to authoritarian practices during the government of Rafael Correa. But what is the support for such affirmations? The cycle of instability (1997–2006) in which institutionality was eroded, and citizens’ rejection of politics became general resulted in three successive presidents who failed to complete their mandates. Faced with a dissatisfied society and the collapse of the party system, within the framework of the greatest economic boom in Ecuador’s history, the new Correa government found conditions favorable to a project of sweeping and radical transformation. A change of government proper to democratic alternation was promoted as a change of political and economic regimes.This was expressed mainly at the institutional level, in the redefinition of the role of the state in the economy, in the reorientation of public policies, and in the electoral preferences of the population.
Institutionally, Correa and his political allies sought to establish an alternative to representative democracy through profound constitutional and legal reforms. The role of the state in the economy turned toward a strongly interventionist model, based mainly on public spending (and made possible by the rising value of commodities in international markets). Correa’s government promoted the centralization of redistributive policies, especially by way of subsidies and state investment in infrastructure. To achieve all this, Correa had electoral support from a population that reelected him twice and gave his political organization (Alianza PAIS) a sufficient legislative majority to govern.
President Correa did not encounter significant obstacles to the application of his economic and political model. This was due to his own political will in a context of weak institutions, supported by an unstructured party rarely engaged in internal debate or deliberation, and political practices that sought to establish a direct relationship with citizens. In addition, there was no opposition to threaten continuity. Thus he maintained tight control over practically all state institutions, and unlike previous administrations that sought to promote partial reforms in various fields, Correa proposed comprehensive transformation of the economic, political, and social realms. The characterization of his movement as a revolution meant avoiding the piecemeal reform of specific components of the political system, aiming instead at integral replacement of all aspects of the prior regime. A pivotal point of this proposal was to transform the state into the central actor of economic activity, not merely in order to regulate, but to drive every dynamic. T...