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27 J. Democracy 109 (2016)
Ecuador under Correa

handle is hein.journals/jnlodmcy27 and id is 480 raw text is: Delegative Democracy Revisited ECUADOR UNDER CORREA Catherine M. Conaghan Catherine M. Conaghan is the Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Latin American Politics at Queen's University, Canada. Her essay Ecuador: Correa's Plebiscitary Presidency appeared in the April 2008 issue of the Journal of Democracy. In his pathbreaking 1994 essay on delegative democracy in these pages, Guillermo O'Donnell identified Ecuador as a member of this new species. Delegative democracies formed a problematic class of regimes-democratic in a plebiscitarian sense but not particularly liber- al or representative-that he saw emerging as Latin America moved on from an era marked by military rule.1 Generals no longer ran things, but taking their place at the center of power was a new breed of ambitious civilian presidents. Chosen through free elections, these chief execu- tives tended to claim a superior grasp of national interests while citing their wins at the polls and displaying a pronounced impatience-at once both populist and technocratic-with ordinary political give-and-take and the institutional restraints imposed by courts, legislatures, and other agencies of horizontal accountability. Whether or not Ecuador wholly fit the description of a delegative de- mocracy at the time O'Donnell was writing, his unease about the country would prove prescient. Ecuador had ended seven years of military juntas and returned to elected, civilian rule in April 1979, making it an early mover in the wave of democratizations that was about to sweep Latin America. Yet Ecuador had trouble finding its way politically as a series of economic, political, and institutional crises pummeled its young de- mocracy. In just the eight years between 1997 and 2005, public outrage at political elites forced no fewer than three presidents from office. Riding to victory as a quintessential outsider candidate, a young economist named Rafael Correa (b. 1963) became president in 2006 un- der circumstances seemingly ripe for the consolidation of a full-spec- trum delegative democracy. In much the way O'Donnell had outlined a Journal of Democracy Volume 27, Number 3 July 2016 © 2016 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

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