The Paradox of Plenty: Women’s and Indigenous Substantive Representation in Ecuador

• In Event: Intersectional Inequalities: Politics of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Religion

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, Ecuador has seen a remarkable increase of women elected to its national legislature. Moreover, it is one of the few countries of the world where, since the 1990s, representation of its principle ethnic minority – indigenous groups – has been close or equal to the percentage of that group’s presence in the population. The prevailing wisdom with regard to the political representation of historically marginalized groups is that with greater numbers of women, ethnic or sexual minorities in office (descriptive representation), one should see an increase in these groups’ substantive representation – meaning greater representation of these groups’ interests on political agendas. In contrast to this prevailing wisdom, my analysis of an original database of 2,750 hand-coded bills presented in the Ecuador National Assembly over three legislative periods reveals a paradox. Despite the high numbers of women and indigenous peoples in the national assembly, legislative production related to these groups’ substantive interests has not climbed as descriptive representation has increased. Moreover, women’s and indigenous peoples’ representation follows very different patterns. This paper provides hypotheses for why we see this paradox. It also explores the disjuncture between women’s and indigenous peoples’ patterns of substantive representation, and the implications of this disjuncture for intersectional politics.

Author

• Christina Ewig, University of Minnesota