Why Democracy by Referendum Seldom Works

Ecuador’s presidents have a history of asking the public to back their initiatives rather than building political coalitions to accomplish their goals. The country’s current president is no different — and it comes at a high cost.

By Eduardo Pagés

September 2025

In early August 2025, invoking the will of the Ecuadorian people and an urgent need for reform, President Daniel Noboa unveiled seven referendum questions to be put before voters as early as December. Six of these questions propose measures that would significantly alter the country’s 2008 Constitution, including shrinking the size of the unicameral National Assembly, lifting the ban on foreign military bases, and eliminating public-campaign financing.

The most contentious proposal, however, sought to give the legislature power to impeach members of the Constitutional Court — the body charged with reviewing laws, executive decrees, and even constitutional referendums themselves. Indeed, tensions between Noboa and the Court were already high: Just weeks earlier, the court temporarily suspended parts of three emergency laws that the president had introduced, including a security law granting immunity to security forces accused of misconduct and an intelligence law permitting warrantless surveillance.

Framing the referendum as a democratic solution to bypass an unelected judiciary, Noboa argued that weakening the Court would clear the path for reforms he deems essential to solving Ecuador’s deepening security crisis. The Court, however, pushed back in early September, blocking the president’s impeachment proposal on the grounds that it would undermine judicial independence — a move that only sharpened Noboa’s hostility toward the judges. To outmaneuver them, he may revive his plans for a referendum asking citizens to approve a constitutional convention, an avenue that would grant him wide latitude to reshape the judiciary and render its members removable.

Yet Ecuador’s history, marked by fleeting parties and power, suggests that this strategy will likely backfire. By weakening the judicial check on executive power, Noboa will be lowering the barriers to constitutional change not only for himself, but for those who would follow him, inadvertently eroding the stability of the country’s democratic institutions for years to come.

A Propensity for Cheap Change

Noboa’s plebiscite would mark the seventh constitutional referendum since 2008, and the second under his tenure. This follows a broader trend of institutional instability in Ecuador, a country that has averaged a new constitution roughly every decade since independence in 1830. For years, Ecuadorian presidents have relied on mechanisms of direct democracy to secure quick policy wins and institutional changes — advancing, and at times undoing, democracy in the process. In the twenty-first century alone, left-wing President Rafael Correa (2007–17) successfully used referendums in 2007 to call for a new constitution tailored to his needs, and subsequently to remove other constraints on presidential power in 2011 and 2017. These changes included limiting the income sources of media outlets and regulating their content, constraining the political rights of Correa’s opponents, and weakening the independence of the country’s courts by establishing a disciplinary body for judges, the Council of the Judiciary.

Mechanisms of direct democracy in Ecuador have been particularly attractive to presidents because they serve as a shortcut — a low-cost alternative to the traditional legislative process — allowing executives to bypass what is often a fragmented national congress. According to the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution, presidents can initiate referendums to engage the people on questions of public policy (known as popular consultations), questions regarding constitutional change (known as amendments), and ultimately, to ask citizens for approval to begin a process of complete constitutional overhaul (constitutional convention).

As a result, executives have preferred to directly ask the public to either erode, build back, or reform democracy instead of forging difficult legislative coalitions. As has been noted by Ecuadorian scholars elsewhere, Correa’s successor, Lenín Moreno (2017–21), paradoxically utilized the very same electoral referendum mechanisms to “reinstitutionalize” democracy in 2018, reestablishing the restrictions Correa had undone during his tenure. These included bringing back reelection restrictions for presidents, a constitutional provision which Correa had eliminated in 2015 via his supermajority in the legislature, as well as purging Correa loyalists from the country’s control authorities, including the attorney general’s office and the very Council of the Judiciary that Correa created years earlier.

More recently in 2023, as a response to Ecuador’s growing drug violence, the center-right government of Guillermo Lasso (2021–23) attempted to legalize extradition of Ecuadorians “in cases of transnational organized crime,” reduce the number of legislators in Congress, and once again change the way in which control authorities are selected. While Lasso ultimately failed to gather support for his proposals, Noboa, who was elected president after Lasso’s 2023 call for snap elections to prevent his impeachment, managed to pick up some of his predecessor’s questions to include in his own referendum attempts. Via a 2024 consultation, Noboa successfully legalized the extradition that Lasso had failed to pass and is preparing to once again ask for a reduction in the number of legislators.

In short, Ecuadorian presidents across the political spectrum have developed a tradition of using referendums to obtain public-policy changes and modify constitutional provisions, as well as constitutions themselves, with astonishing speed. Presidents can use referendums, which they may call at any time, to bypass congress and reengage the electorate with the very issues (and at times, exact questions) their predecessors had brought forth, with the goal of either undoing past reforms or reattempting failed ones. After all, Ecuadorians may respond differently to the same questions depending on the political moment and, particularly, the sitting president’s popularity.

Giants with Feet of Clay

As it turns out, cheap change may ultimately be quite expensive. Regardless of an executive’s intentions to use referendums in service of or against democratic expansion, bypassing the control of the country’s 151 representatives degrades Ecuadorian democracy in two ways — namely, reducing horizontal accountability and fostering institutional weakness.

First, presidentially led referendums expand executive power by limiting the ability of congress to provide oversight of proposed reforms. By presenting issues to the public first, executives avoid debates that would allow for detailed deliberation on whether a piece of legislation is technically and constitutionally sound. Legislative involvement is limited merely to developing laws to implement the popular mandate. Yet deliberation is critical in contexts where citizens may not have the knowledge to understand complex reforms, with referendum results often being just a reflection of a president’s popularity. Indeed, presidents in Latin America understand referendums this way, and are most likely to expand mechanisms of direct democracy when their own approval is at its peak — in essence, instrumentalizing the electorate to rubber stamp presidential priorities.

Second, presidentially led referendums produce unstable institutional changes, cutting short the legacies, democratic or not, that presidents would hope to root within Ecuadorian society. By bypassing the already strained representative function of the legislature — namely, the input and buy-in of other key political players who may tomorrow occupy the presidency or congress themselves — constitutional changes reliant on plebiscites are fleeting and easily undone. Such dynamics reflect Ecuador’s, as well as Latin America’s, long history of party volatility and economic shocks. While the party of President Guillermo Lasso virtually disappeared from the national scene after the 2023 snap election, Noboa’s newly formed National Democratic Action became the second-largest party in the National Assembly in 2025. Similarly, when Correa’s party split after he left office in 2017, his handpicked successor, Moreno, set about undoing Correa’s legacy to legitimize his own rule once state oil resources dried up. Historically, established parties ebb and flow with each legislative period. The Pachakutik and Democratic Left parties, for example, suddenly became two of the biggest legislative blocs in 2021, only to then obtain few or no seats in 2023.

Ecuadorian presidents who “go it alone,” may soon find the sands shifting under the houses they built. Moreover, with the ongoing serial replacement of laws, politicians and their parties may come to expect instability and therefore refuse to comply with or make investments in the current democratic framework. Presidents need not obey term limits, nor prepare for them by choosing successors, if term limits can be easily removed. Parties may continue to obtain financing through illicit resources if state funding is not guaranteed. Both citizens and elites can refuse to adapt to democratic norms if they are volatile and easily changed, essentially making them powerless. Ecuador’s long history of constitutional assemblies and reforms showcases this tendency, with presidential contenders refusing to play by the rules put in place by their predecessors, constantly campaigning to “refound” or “birth” a new state via a “single stroke,” in the words of Presidents Noboa, Correa, and Lasso, respectively.

Paradoxically, then, the abuse of referendums in Ecuador has produced delegative, yet weak, presidencies. When executive approval is on the rise, presidents can push whatever policies, constitutional reforms, or overhauls they wish, without any review from the sitting congress. When power shifts, however, that disregard of horizontal accountability renders these reforms vulnerable to reform themselves, once newly empowered political players emerge.

Exacerbating Serial Reforms

In this context of serial replacement, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court stands as the last remaining filter in the process of generating sweeping referendums. According to the 2008 Constitution, the Court plays a key role in interpreting, and thus effectively vetting, the president’s questions. Referendums containing constitutional amendments, for example, cannot restrict fundamental rights, modify the process for amending the constitution, or change the nature and constituent elements of the state. If the executive’s proposals are found to attempt such changes, the Court will direct the president either to move them through the legislature before consulting the public or to call for a constituent assembly. Indeed, the Court forced Noboa to move his question on allowing foreign military bases in Ecuador through the National Assembly before asking the public directly.

For these very reasons, Noboa has mounted a comprehensive effort to attack and discredit the Constitutional Court, using national television to frame the body’s members as “enemies of the people” and leading public protests and security deployments against the justices. Noboa then threatened to use the referendum to ask citizens whether to allow the justices’ impeachment. Lifting that protection would undermine the Court’s independence.

By rejecting Noboa’s impeachment question, the Constitutional Court has shown that it will not permit its own demise — for now. Sustained and credible threats can push courts to make decisions that are against their own interests in favor of executives. The Venezuelan Supreme Court was notoriously pressured into enabling the country’s 1999 constitutional convention, which resulted in that court’s own replacement. Noboa’s cabinet has given no indication that it will back down from its confrontation with the Constitutional Court. The president’s judicial team has made clear that it is analyzing all legal options at its disposal. A constitutional convention, which the government claims is legitimate in extreme situations, would present an opportunity to reshuffle the Court and remove the justices’ protections. With a coopted Court, Noboa’s reforms would be free of yet another horizontal-oversight mechanism, making the drastic modification of the current constitution, as well as future iterations, highly probable.

Such a strategy has already been pursued by past presidents. Correa, after successfully leading a constitutional convention, coopted the Court’s nomination process to ensure that judicial outcomes were favorable to his causes, making post-convention changes easier. A substantial reform ensuring the Court’s independence took place only in 2019, as a result of Moreno’s referendum-based overhaul of the country’s control authorities. But if Noboa succeeds in permitting impeachment of justices, they would become vulnerable to the pressure of presidential threats, from both his government and that of future executives. In a bid to empower his own government, Noboa would thus further decrease the stability of the country’s institutions for years to come.

The solutions to Ecuador’s every problem do not lie in referendums alone. The country’s leaders must stop abusing direct democracy and instead begin engaging in the difficult task of fostering broad-based coalitions while accepting the legal hand they have been dealt. In the context of Ecuador’s acute security crisis, this may seem like a moot point, with elites and the electorate desperately seeking solutions by any means. But given Ecuador’s long history of feeble reforms, its leaders should consider another approach if they have any desire for their remedies to outlast a single electoral period.

Eduardo Pagés is manager for global democracy research at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute, where he curates the institution’s Global Democracy Conferences. He previously served as a researcher conducting program evaluations of U.S.-funded democracy-promotion efforts, including at the International Republican Institute.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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