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<p>This article explains how Ecuador decriminalized euthanasia—an unlikely outcome in a conservative setting—through an INUS configuration that coupled: (1) an institutional design enabling citizens to bypass legislative deadlock; (2) a problem broker whose personal struggle reframed a moral conflict as a constitutional claim; and (3) a policy community able to translate that claim into constitutionally legible safeguards. This triad, when combined with the strategic coupling efforts of policy entrepreneurs in a given political context, can create a configuration of conditions that enables binding normative change despite adverse partisan dynamics. Using theory-building process tracing, we reconstruct the causal sequence from court filings to the ruling, drawing on official decisions, interviews, and public statements, complemented by World Values Survey evidence on attitudinal shifts and digital traces from X that capture coalition building and framing. Conceptually, we put institutional design in the foreground of the Multiple Streams Framework as a structural determinant of both policy and decision windows. Where constitutional activation is available, an apex constitutional review body can convert agenda salience into binding normative change, even under adverse political conditions, provided that proposals reach policy readiness and are institutionally legible.</p>

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Euthanasia, institutions, and constitutional innovation in Ecuador: testing the multiple streams framework to explain agenda setting in Latin America

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月9日

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  • Margarita Manosalvas Vaca,
  • Juan Federico Pino Uribe

摘要

This article explains how Ecuador decriminalized euthanasia—an unlikely outcome in a conservative setting—through an INUS configuration that coupled: (1) an institutional design enabling citizens to bypass legislative deadlock; (2) a problem broker whose personal struggle reframed a moral conflict as a constitutional claim; and (3) a policy community able to translate that claim into constitutionally legible safeguards. This triad, when combined with the strategic coupling efforts of policy entrepreneurs in a given political context, can create a configuration of conditions that enables binding normative change despite adverse partisan dynamics. Using theory-building process tracing, we reconstruct the causal sequence from court filings to the ruling, drawing on official decisions, interviews, and public statements, complemented by World Values Survey evidence on attitudinal shifts and digital traces from X that capture coalition building and framing. Conceptually, we put institutional design in the foreground of the Multiple Streams Framework as a structural determinant of both policy and decision windows. Where constitutional activation is available, an apex constitutional review body can convert agenda salience into binding normative change, even under adverse political conditions, provided that proposals reach policy readiness and are institutionally legible.