Abstract
Abstract The “citizen revolution” was a political project executed mainly between 2007 and 2016 by the former president of the Republic of Ecuador, Rafael Correa Delgado, under the paradigm of 21st century socialism. The main characteristic of this project was to introduce a new political agenda to the country that was differentiated from past agendas, by focusing on issues such as the recognition of new rights, improvements to education, instituting a new economic model, and strengthening government and sovereignty, among others. Under this context, this work aims to analyze the political attention of the ex-president, explaining why some issues are more important than others, and why they varied over time. Based on a conceptual framework that takes ideas from the agenda-setting theory, the areas on which the political agenda concentrates are measured by the Shannon entropy index, and its various changes are explained as the results of preferences, institutional factors, and external events. The analysis is based on extensive database analyses of 10 years (covering Rafael Correa’s presidency) of government speeches, which are coded according to the methodology of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to apply the CAP methodology in Ecuador.
Highlights
A political agenda consists of an inventory of issues, situations and problems that a society considers essential at specific times and locations (Kingdon, 1984)
The question is: how can a president set the political agenda in a world where information is abundant and not everything can be considered important? One of the ways in which such agenda-setting can be understand is by studying the official speeches of the head of state
To the best of our knowledge, this paper represents the first application of Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) methodology to the study of Ecuadorian politics. We apply it here to analyze the political attention represented by the agenda of the ex-president Rafael Correa Delgado to explain why some issues are more important than others and why they vary over time
Summary
A political agenda consists of an inventory of issues, situations and problems that a society considers essential at specific times and locations (Kingdon, 1984). The agenda setting approach seeks to study the issues that do manage to enter the political agenda—how they manage this and why Such concepts have been extensively analyzed from both practical and theoretical viewpoints (Bachrach & Baratz, 1962; Baumgartner & Jones, 2010; Cobb & Elder, 1980; Downs, 1972; Jones & Baumgartner, 2005; Kingdon, 1984; McCombs & Shaw, 1972; Schattschneider, 1960). Preferences constitute only one variable that explains political results (Baumgartner et al, 2011; Green-Pedersen, 2007; Walgrave, Varone, & Dumont, 2006), meaning that attention to different issues in presidential speeches is driven by party preferences and by institutional factors, new flows of information, and sudden changes, such as an economic crisis (Chaqués-Bonafont, Baumgartner, & Palau, 2015). These three political agenda explanatory variables will be analyzed and related from a theoretical viewpoint to explain the Ecuadorian political agenda
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