Citizenship Education Reform in Ecuador: Better institutions? Or Better populism?

In Ecuador during the presidency of Rafael Correa (2007-2017), who is categorised in the literature as a competitive authoritarian multicultural populist leader (Levitsky & Loxton 2013; De la Torre 2013; Alberti 2019), an educational reform was developed in 2016, which had as a novelty a strong emphasis on citizenship education from a historical, political and legal approach to citizenship practices (Siede 2013). This, through the subjects of History, Philosophy and Citizenship Education. From this, this research works within the contents of student texts to find out whether they generate a liberal or civic-republican type of citizenship (Walzer 2001). And, within this conceptualisation, through a combination of ethnographic work with educational actors and the use of surveys for large student groups, to understand whether the contents encourage students to believe in strong democratic institutions or in a strong authoritarian populist leadership (Levitsky and Loxton 2013) or in a hybrid model of governance. Since, according to Alberti (2019), populist leaders in the Andes use multiculturalism only in their electoral political rhetoric and not in high public policy implementation. Therefore, this research proposes to verify what Alberti mentioned by analysing the Ecuadorian educational public policy, in its curriculum reform in Social Sciences given during Correa's government.