Democracy in Ecuador

Running head: DEMOCRACY IN ECUADOR
Democracy in Ecuador
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1DEMOCRACY IN ECUADOR
As opined by Wolff, Spanger and Puhle (2013), freedom is the kind of political
ideology that provides equal rights to every citizen of the country. It helps in the protection of
the human rights of the people and allows every single citizen to choose a representative for
their country on their own with complete freedom. However, it is a system of rules and norms
by the law and not by the citizens (Habermas 2015). According to Martínez (2016),
democracy has its essential elements which are to be strictly applied in the prospect of
ensuring an unbiased democracy in a country. The vital components are determined as –
accountability of the selected official towards the citizens, to follow the rule of law which
implies that not even the elected official is above the law, equality, active participation of
every citizen in the political and civic life, transparency in the government rules and
regulations, regular fair elections, protection of human rights, accepting the result of the vote
and not forcing the citizens or bribing them and not abusing the power in the hands of the
elected official. In this connection, this essay focuses on determining the democracy of
Ecuador and the probability of the level of democracy in Ecuador in the next three years.
As stated by Shade (2015), Ecuador is an underdeveloped democratic country. The
author claimed that the leftist government, Rafael Correa had been governing the country
since 2007 (Becker 2013). The restrictions imposed by the former president Rafael Correa on
the civil and media society had limited the office’s ability to allow external funding and
indulging into press releases (De la Torre 2013). In the initial period of his governing Correa
gained high popularity and was elected thrice till decade (2007-2017). During his second
period of governing his stability in Ecuador started to decline. The government revenues had
decreased due to the earthquake that took place in April 2016 and had left 651 people dead,
over 4000 injured and displacement of around 30000 people (Ye et al. 2016). The
government property exceeded a loss of approximately $3.3 billion, and Correa had
implemented a non- strategic budget tightening system to solve the same which created

2DEMOCRACY IN ECUADOR
enormous political tensions (Cordero-Reyes 2017). This resulted in the decline of his
approval by a level of 35% in the mid of 2016. Nevertheless, Correa was also accused of
oppressing freedom of the press, restricting freedom of assembly and association and even
the independence of the judiciary (Conaghan 2016). Protests started diverging from several
indigenous groups, citizens and environmentalists towards Correa and also the relation
between Ecuador and the United States had strained under the governance of Correa.
However, when the power came into the hands of a new administration in 2017, the elected
official began to roll back those restrictions as reverse Correa-era policies (Sanchez-Sibony
2017).
The new policies veered away from the old systems used by Correa as soon as it came
into power. The new governing president Moreno called a national referendum on February
4, 2018 (Rogatyuk 2018). He openly challenged few of the efforts of Correa governments to
centralise power, abolishing of unclear re-election and limiting tenure to two terms which
included the turn back that judiciary will constitute of only presidential supporters, and
creating limits to mining in indigenous and protected areas. These measures implemented by
the new governing party won with greater than 60% voter approval. However, President
Moreno had to face some economic and governing challenges to improve the condition of the
refraining situation of democracy in Ecuador, and he was successful in doing the same.
According to the survey done on World Bank, it was examined that the percentage of GDP in
the trade services started to decline since 2015 with a level of 5.6% from 5.8% in 2015 and
exceeding to 5.3% in 2016 under the governance of Correa (Databank.worldbank.org 2019).
However, as soon as the governance turned into the hands of Moreno, a slight increment to
the GDP was examined, which was 5.4% in the year 2017. As opined by the Worlds Value
Survey Wave 6: 2010-2014, when surveyed a question to the general citizens about the
importance of politics in their day-to-day life only 21.1% of the public gave a positive