Ecuador

In this chapter, we describe the institutional settings of legislative debates in the Ecuador Congress and evaluate the speechmaking patterns using original data from 1988 to 2018. We show that the main determinants of participation in debates in Ecuador are whether legislators hold positions of power within the legislature and whether the legislator is from the same party as the President of Congress. In addition, we highlight the significance of gender as a determinant for access to the floor and floor time. Specifically, we find that women speak less and for a shorter time than men. We also show that increasing descriptive participation of women in the legislature is not enough to increase participation on the floor and find that women in positions of power are able to eliminate the participation gap with men.