The Wake Up Call
From The West Wing (Season 6, Episode 14)
Categories:
Run time: 4:57
Clip Description: Christopher Lloyd playing Laurence Lessig, talks about how the Constitution is just the start of democratic culture.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is a powerful reminder of the importance of citizen trust and buy-in for the long-term stability of democracy.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip can be used to teach about both democratic consolidation and Constitutional powers.
Discussion Questions
- The claim in this scene is that the constitution is where the work starts, not where it ends. Madison had already made the pessimistic version of the same point: he warned in Federalist 48 that a “parchment barrier” would not by itself restrain anybody who wanted to cross it. If the text is not what holds a constitutional system together, what is — habits, courts, elections, the expectation of losing gracefully — and can any of that be written into a document, or only grown?
- The American constitution is among the oldest and shortest still operating, and constitutional drafters abroad routinely decline to copy it. The standard objection is that a separately elected president and a separately elected legislature can each claim the people’s mandate, with no constitutional way to break the tie; Juan Linz’s “The Perils of Presidentialism” is the short version worth looking at. Make the strongest case for recommending the American design to a country drafting from scratch this year, then make the strongest case against it.
- Name one constitutional rule you follow because it is law and would be enforced against you, and one that everyone around you follows only because breaking it would be unthinkable. Which list is longer? And what do you think actually happens to the second list at the moment enough people stop finding those things unthinkable — does the first list expand to cover them, or does it turn out the first list was resting on the second all along?
Assignment
Written constitutions are public and most are short. Pick one adopted in the last forty years — the Constitute Project puts full texts side by side — and read one provision closely against its American counterpart: emergency powers, the amendment procedure, how judges are appointed and removed, or what happens when the executive loses a legislative majority. In two pages, explain what problem those drafters were solving that the Americans in 1787 were not, and then take a side on which provision is better designed. The hard part is that you cannot resolve it by pointing at which country is currently doing better; you have to argue from the text and the incentives it creates.
For AP Students
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 1: Political Systems, Regimes, and Governments
Topics: 1.4 Democratization; 1.8 Political Legitimacy; 1.9 Sustaining Legitimacy
Skill: Concept Application
Big ideas: Democratization; Legitimacy and Stability
Course countries: Russia, Nigeria, Mexico
A constitutional scholar helping Belarus draft a democratic constitution argues that the document is where a democracy starts rather than where it arrives. That is precisely the distinction the course draws between holding elections and consolidating a democracy, and it is the distinction students collapse most often, usually by treating an election as proof of a regime type.
Discussion questions
- Explain the difference between a country that has a democratic constitution and a country that is a consolidated democracy. Name one thing that has to be true for the second.
- Russia has a constitution, a legislature and regular elections, and is not counted as a democracy. Name two features that explain why.
- Nigeria has transferred power between parties by election. Mexico ended seventy-one years of single-party rule in 2000. Pick one and say what made the transfer hold.
Short activity
The consolidation checklist (15 minutes). Students list five conditions a country would have to meet before they would call its democracy consolidated — a free press, courts that rule against the government, losers who accept defeat, and so on. Then they score one course country out of five, one line of justification per item. Collect the scores. The disagreement between students who scored the same country differently is the actual lesson, because it forces them to defend a threshold rather than a label.