This article addresses, in a comparative perspective, the conditions under which legislatures find greater incentives to overcome a presidential veto. The authors' framework points out that the legislative override is used selectively, essentially when the presidential veto is in particularistic bills, and in the context of unstable democracies. To test their theoretical argument the authors used an unpublished database on bills processed in Ecuador between 1979 and 2019. Though theories of veto bargaining predict the override success rates should be 50 per cent, the authors show that, similar to the US, in Ecuador the override success is relatively low. Although the effective number of political parties is a statistically significant variable too, the empirical findings are more consistent with the first hypothesis.