Week 7 — Design the Machinery: A Constitution of Your Own and the Removal Test — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 7 of the term — design the legislature and executive of a made-up country, sort three more constitutions with the removal test, and explain to someone why a president does not make a system presidential.

This week you learned what legislatures and executives do, the one-chamber-or-two choice, the split between head of state and head of government, and the parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential designs. Week 6 showed you what a constitution creates and divides, and Week 1 gave you the empirical/normative distinction; this assignment puts both to work on a constitution you write. In this assignment you work two short counting problems, interpret each one, and explain the removal test to someone who has never studied comparative politics. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will write a short constitution for a made-up country, then classify three more made-up constitutions. Treat every country as illustrative: none of them is real, and no real person or current officeholder belongs in any of them.

Work these two problems, showing how you got each count:

Your made-up country's legislature has 150 seats, and its key votes need a majority of all members: half the seats, plus 1 more vote. How many votes is that majority?
You classify 3 made-up constitutions, and for each one you record 2 facts: how its executive is chosen and how it is removed. How many entries do you record?

Beside each count, add the interpretation that makes it political science:

Problem 1, your constitution. Choose a parliamentary, presidential, or semi-presidential design for your country, and state its removal rule: how a failing government would be removed (a vote of no confidence, impeachment for serious wrongdoing, or both). Decide whether its legislature has one chamber or two, and use the Inter-Parliamentary Union's count (of 188 national parliaments, 81 are bicameral and 107 unicameral) to say what is common and what the count does not show. Name the office that is head of state and the office that is head of government, and say whether they are one office or two. Say which votes your majority decides in your design. Then defend your design with at least one premise labelled empirical and one labelled normative, state the strongest case for a design you rejected as its defenders would put it (using Linz's worries about presidentialism or the identifiability and checks replies), and give your reply.
Problem 2, three more constitutions. Write three short made-up constitutions, one of each design. For each, record how the executive is chosen and how it is removed, and name its design using the removal test. Make one of them a country that has a president and is still parliamentary, and sort it accordingly. If one of your parliamentary countries needs two parties to form a government, say why that coalition is a normal mode rather than a sign of failure.

Explain it to a non-expert

A cousin tells you, "France and Germany both have presidents, so their governments must work the same way as the United States'." Write a 3–5 sentence message to that cousin that explains, in everyday words, why the title of an office does not decide the design, uses the removal test as the example, and names one limit of what you can tell from the removal test alone. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a volunteer at a public library explaining the reading room's quiet-hours rule to a newcomer. Model answer: "We keep the reading room quiet in the evenings because that is when students come in to study for exams. It is not about anyone disliking noise. If you need to talk, the lobby next door is open until closing. The limit is that the rule covers this room only, so the children's area down the hall runs on its own schedule."

Use that pattern for your message to the cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show how you got each count. A reader should be able to reproduce both counts from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

After you finish, reread your work and revise at least one design choice, classification, or explanation. Then add a short reflection (3–4 sentences) on one of two options of equal weight, your choice: (a) which design choice or classification you changed and why the new version is better; or (b) which constitution you first sorted by an office's title instead of its removal rule, and how you caught it.

Deliverables

Submit a single design file containing:

the two counts, each with the values and the operation shown;
your constitution (its design, its removal rule, one chamber or two read against the parliament count, the head of state and head of government by office, the votes the majority decides, a defense with premises labelled by kind, the strongest case for a rejected design, and your reply);
your three classified constitutions (each with how the executive is chosen and removed, and its design);
your message to the cousin; and
your revision note with the reflection option you chose.

Keep it to roughly two pages. Clear and accurate beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about four minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of each design with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the constitutions, the defense, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Quote only the pinned constitutional and Bagehot fragments, exactly, and state Linz's argument in your own words. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's design, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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