Chapter 37 Exercises

These exercises operationalize the chapter. Several are designed to be hard for the student because they require examining one's own coalition's behavior with the same scrutiny one extends to the other coalition's behavior. The cross-partisan steel-manning required is, by the chapter's argument, the central civic discipline democratic erosion calls for. Treat these exercises in that spirit.

The exercises do not have answer keys printed at the end. Some have factual components (an institutional record, a vote count) where the answer can be verified by primary source. Others are analytical exercises where the test is the quality of your reasoning, not the conclusion you reach. Where written products are required, the exercise indicates a target length.

Exercise 1: Norm Violations Across Four Administrations

For each of the past four administrations — Obama (2009–17), Trump 1 (2017–21), Biden (2021–25), and Trump 2 (2025–present) — identify three specific institutional-norm violations that the administration in question committed. The norm violations should be drawn from the inventory in Section 37.4 of the chapter or from analogous categories. For each example, write 75–100 words covering: (a) the specific action; (b) the norm that was violated or pressed; (c) the administration's stated justification; (d) the criticism from the other side or from non-aligned commentators.

The discipline this exercise enforces: identifying real norm-pressing actions on every administration's record, including the one whose policy positions you may share. If your three Obama and three Biden examples come more easily than your three Trump examples, or vice versa, sit with that. Generate the harder list. Treat the disciplines (Recess appointments, executive orders bypassing Congress, expansive use of federal authority over state matters, pardon-power use, Justice Department actions, signing-statement use) as available across all four administrations.

Length: ~1,000–1,200 words for the full set of twelve examples.

Exercise 2: Reading a V-Dem Index Entry

Visit v-dem.net and locate the Liberal Democracy Index time series for the United States. Examine the data from 2000 through the most recent year available. Then write a 350–500 word memo that:

  1. States the highest and lowest U.S. LDI scores in the period and the years in which they occurred.
  2. Identifies the period of largest decline and quantifies it.
  3. Identifies the V-Dem subcomponents (electoral rights, judicial independence, executive constraints, civil liberties) that have moved most.
  4. States one objection that a critic of V-Dem methodology might raise to the U.S. coding, and the strongest response a defender of the methodology could give.
  5. Concludes with your own assessment of how much weight you give to the V-Dem reading.

The exercise tests your ability to engage a measurement instrument critically — accepting its evidentiary value while recognizing its limitations.

Select one legal-institutional dispute that is active or recently decided as of your reading of this chapter. Suggested options (any of these or another the instructor approves):

  • The 2025 firings of Inspectors General and the litigation around the 30-day-notice statutory requirement.
  • Litigation around the deployment of federalized National Guard units in connection with civil unrest in U.S. cities.
  • The application of Trump v. United States (2024) on remand to lower-court proceedings.
  • Litigation around the Trump-2 administration's invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for tariff actions.
  • The state-court litigation around Trump pardons' application to state-prosecuted offenses.
  • The continuing effects of Murthy v. Missouri on government coordination with social-media platforms.

For your selected dispute, write a 600–800 word brief covering: (a) the constitutional or statutory authority at issue; (b) the administration's position; (c) the opposition's position; (d) the current state of litigation, including any rulings to date; (e) the institutional implications of the possible outcomes; and (f) the position you currently hold on the merits and your reasoning.

The exercise grounds the chapter's analytical content in active institutional cases, of which there will be several at any given time.

Exercise 4: Steel-Manning the Three Major Positions

The chapter steel-mans four positions on democratic erosion in Section 37.7. Take the three most prominent — Position 1 (the asymmetric-erosion-is-real position, associated with Levitsky and Ziblatt and the Cheney/Kristol tradition); Position 2 (the institutional-system-is-responding-correctly position, associated with portions of the Federalist Society and National Review tradition); and Position 3 (the real-erosion-is-on-the-left position, associated with the New Right and some libertarian commentators).

Write a 400–500 word essay for each position from the perspective of its strongest articulator. Each essay should:

  1. State the position's central empirical claims.
  2. State the position's central normative commitments.
  3. Identify two or three specific events or institutional patterns the position foregrounds.
  4. Anticipate the strongest objection from the other positions and respond.

The discipline: each of the three essays must be written as if it were entirely sincere and entirely correct. A reader unfamiliar with your views should not be able to identify which position you yourself hold from the relative quality of the three essays. If your essays for the position you favor are noticeably stronger than the essays for the positions you don't, redo the weaker ones.

Length: ~1,500 words total.

Exercise 5: A Comparative-Case Analogy

The chapter discusses six comparative cases: Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, India, and Israel. Select one. Write a 700–900 word comparative essay arguing one of two theses:

  • Thesis A: "The U.S. case in 2020–26 has substantial structural similarities to [your selected comparator], and the comparison is informative about possible U.S. trajectories."
  • Thesis B: "The U.S. case in 2020–26 differs in fundamental respects from [your selected comparator], and the comparison risks misleading the U.S. policy debate."

Whichever thesis you defend, you must: 1. Identify three specific structural features the comparator country shares with the U.S. case. 2. Identify three specific structural features the comparator country does not share with the U.S. case. 3. Make an argument about which set of features is more determinative for the comparison's usefulness. 4. Cite at least one specific finding from the comparative-democracy literature on your selected case.

The exercise tests your ability to engage cross-national evidence carefully, neither over-extrapolating from a single foreign case nor dismissing comparative evidence outright.

Exercise 6: Identify Your Own Party's Norm-Pressing Actions

This is the chapter's hardest exercise. You will identify the party whose policy positions you most often agree with — the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, a third party, or (if you do not have a clear preference) the coalition you find yourself defending more often in conversations.

Then write a 600–800 word memo identifying:

  1. Three specific institutional-norm violations or hardball moves the party has engaged in over the past two decades.
  2. The strongest internal critique of those moves — that is, criticism from people within the same coalition who have argued that their own side went too far. (For Democrats: Manchin on the filibuster, Yuval Levin's center-right but cross-coalition writing, The Bulwark's coverage of issues where Republican-affiliated voices criticize Democratic moves; for Republicans: Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, The Bulwark's Republican-affiliated writers, the Niskanen Center, the National Review voices who criticized Trump-1 actions.)
  3. Your assessment of whether and how the cross-pressures of partisanship made it difficult to recognize the norm violations at the time.
  4. A statement of what disposition or practice would help you identify your own party's norm violations more quickly in the future.

The exercise is unpleasant. That is the point. The chapter's argument is that the strongest institutional-norm enforcement comes from same-party criticism, and that habit has to be cultivated as a discipline.

Exercise 7: Comparative Reading on January 6 and January 8

The chapter's Case Study 1 treats January 6, 2021, in detail. The events of January 8, 2023 — the storming of Brazilian government buildings by supporters of former President Bolsonaro — are sometimes compared to January 6.

Read at least one substantial account of each event (one in English-language press for January 6 and one for January 8; the Lawfare and Just Security blogs both have extensive coverage of both, as does the international press in the months following). Write a 500–700 word comparative analysis identifying:

  1. Three specific similarities in the events.
  2. Three specific differences.
  3. How the institutional response in each country differed (prosecutions, pardons, political consequences, comparative-democracy assessments).
  4. What the comparison illuminates about the resilience or vulnerability of constitutional systems to organized political violence.

Exercise 8: Democracy Audit on Local Institutional Accountability

This exercise applies the Democracy Audit project of this textbook to your own congressional district and state.

For your home district and state, research and document:

  1. Election administration. Who runs elections in your county? Are they elected, appointed, or both? What is their party affiliation, if disclosed? Have any of them faced public pressure since 2020?
  2. State-level institutional changes since 2020. Identify three specific changes to election administration, voting rights, or post-election procedures enacted by your state's legislature since November 2020. State the change, the partisan composition of the body that enacted it, and the documented effects (where data are available).
  3. Local institutional norm questions. Has your state's executive branch or legislature taken any actions since 2017 that have been characterized in news reporting as norm-pressing? Examples might include: efforts to remove or restructure independent commissions; changes to the powers of the state attorney general; emergency-power exercises by governors; legislative override or evasion of court rulings.
  4. Local civil-society capacity. Identify three institutions in your area (independent press outlets, civic organizations, professional associations) that play roles in mediating political disagreement or holding officials accountable. Are these institutions stronger, weaker, or about the same as a generation ago?

Compile your findings in a 700–1,000 word report.

The exercise grounds the abstract chapter in your local political reality. The argument that "power flows to those who show up" applies most concretely at the local and state level, where institutional norms are tested most often and least visibly.

A Note on the Exercise Set

Some of the above exercises will be uncomfortable. That is by design. The chapter's central claim is that the work of citizenship in a system under stress requires habits of mind that are not partisan reflexes. The exercises are calibrated to develop those habits. If you find yourself making excuses for your own coalition's behavior that you would not make for the other coalition's behavior, sit with that. The discipline is to do the same work both ways.

The grading rubric for any of these exercises that the instructor scores should weight the following equally: factual accuracy, completeness of coverage, and even-handedness of treatment. A response that is factually accurate but applies the analytical framework asymmetrically — that, for example, identifies three substantive Trump-1 norm violations but only formal or trivial Biden norm violations, or vice versa — is not a complete response, regardless of which way the asymmetry runs. The chapter's argument is that this discipline, sustained across many small choices, is what civic engagement on contested institutional questions actually consists in.

A final pedagogical note. Several exercises ask the reader to engage primary sources: V-Dem datasets, Senate roll-call votes, judicial opinions, congressional reports. These primary-source engagements are not academic exercises divorced from civic life. They are the kinds of engagements that, multiplied across millions of citizens over time, constitute the institutional pressure on political actors to operate within democratic norms. Exercises 1, 6, and 8 are particularly designed to be returnable: a reader who completes them this semester might usefully complete them again two years from now, comparing what has changed and what has not. Norms are sustained or eroded over time, and so is the civic capacity that monitors them.