The Role of the Opposition in the Ecuadorian Legislature

Whenever we think of opposition and opposition parties, we think of relevant agents –in democratic regimes– that seek to expose the government to challenges and public scrutiny. Important distinctions on the scope and functions of the opposition in the Legislature have been drawn between parliamentary and presidential systems. An important difference is the amount of power for decision-making opposition parties may have in presidential democracies. Despite the efforts to overcome the gaps in opposition parties' research in the Legislatures of presidential democracies, we empirically find that the opposition's effectiveness is undermined when it comes to generating public policy within the legislative periods. We address this gap by analysing the opposition's law-making procedures in the Ecuadorian Legislature between 2009 and 2023. To accomplish this, we use a novel dataset and implement logistic regression analyses to examine the legislative behaviour of both government and opposition parties when introducing and managing bills. Among the most relevant findings, we find that opposition parties are efficient when it comes to introducing law reforms. Nevertheless, those bills introduced by the opposition have fewer odds of becoming law. Additionally, we find that opposition party members are less inclined to introduce bills in times in which the President holds a party majority in the Legislature. We expect our research to highlight the importance of opposition parties in the Legislature for law-making initiatives. Additionally, building upon the findings on the Ecuadorian case, we aim to push forward the research agenda of the role of opposition parties in Latin American Legislatures.