Case study: what did Rafael Correa say? Comparing political attention across 10 years of the Ecuadorian president’s discourses

Estudio de caso: ¿qué dijo Rafael Correa? Comparando la atención política en 10 años de discursos del presidente ecuatoriano

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 21^st 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.

Keywords:
agenda setting; issue agendas; executive speeches; political attention; Rafael Correa