Ep 01 – The Constitute Project Pt. 1

[0:00:02 Speaker 0] constitutions last about 19 years on average. That means somewhere in the world a Constitution was born with you. And by the time you started college, that Constitution was getting shoot out of its home to. So how does the nation go about creating a new constitution? Welcome to the connector, where we bring together innovative, groundbreaking and collaborative research inside the U. T. Austin political science universe. I’m your host, Stewart Tendler. This inaugural episode is the first in a three part series, drawing from an in depth conversation with Zach Elkins and Robert Shafer of the Constitute Project. In this episode, we talk about the origins of the Comparative Constitutions Project, which helps anyone compare just about any Constitution in the world. How does the United States Constitution compared to, say, France, Indonesia, Russia, you can find out. We discuss how comparative constitutions led to the creation of the constitute project, which gives modern day constitutional drafters model texts to help them write new constitutions more effectively. We conclude part one by discussing the importance of how data is presented, constitute collaborated with the Texas Advanced Computing Center and brought their research toe life. They exploded their data onto sprawling wall displays at a public museum exhibit. Patrons could walk up to graphs, charts and maps to not only analyze the data but actively interact with it to learn a new and exciting ways way. [0:01:42 Speaker 3] Start with some introductions. Were here with Robert Schaeffer with Zach Elkins and Zach. Why don’t you tell us who you are? [0:01:49 Speaker 2] Yes, Eso I’m a professor, associate professor, actually, in the Department of Government. I work on ah, these days a lot on constitutions and the origins and effects of national constitutions have generally working the Earth comparative politics, Um, especially with district of Latin America, but also deal with issues of national identity, an institutional reform, [0:02:13 Speaker 3] And Robert, who are you? [0:02:15 Speaker 1] I’m 1/4 year PhD student in the Department of Government. I mostly study institutional design in the context of law and legal text. Do a lot of computational work. So a lot of computational text analysis of law and legislation and sort of the structure of law and how that reflects political balance of power and that sort of thing. [0:02:36 Speaker 3] Excellent. And we’re here today to talk primarily about constitute Zakheim, I guess most interested to just know where this project came from and how this idea started and how it got going. [0:02:51 Speaker 2] Yeah, well, it has its roots in the Comparative Constitutions Project, which is something that I found it in direct with. My colleague Tom Ginsberg is at the Interstate Chicago and in 2005 we decided that what the world needed was a data set on the content of constitutions. Nothing like that existed before. Ah, we were interested in all sorts of research questions regarding the origins of constitutions and their effects and toe. Answer those questions. Really. You need to know what’s in constitutions. So we developed this data set Ah, and ah, we collected. First of all, what we did was to identify when constitutions changed when they were written, when we were replaced, when they were revised. When they’re suspended, it said all those events. And so that’s a massive historical undertaking unto itself. But then we had to collect all the texts associated with those changes and then read them and analyze them and essentially record their contents using this ah, inventory this conceptual inventory that identified all the concepts and aspects of constitutions in which we’re interested and so we built this data set and we’ve been combing and analyzing that data set for five or six years now. And we learned as we started to get into the business of constitutional design, that it is in fact, a business that people are writing constitutions constantly. And as you can imagine, the people writing constitutions need a lot of help. They have never really done this before, though likely never do it again. And they have some basic needs in terms of research, analysis, and essentially, the best way to get a sense of what you want in your Constitution is just to see what others have done. And so our data set was interesting to them. Ah, to the extent that we could understand these patterns in constitutional design over the last 200 years. But what we discovered is what they really needed was some actual text. So if they have a deadline and they have to come up with some text for a certain provisions, let’s say on the environment they need to look at some model tax from other constitutions. And so what we found herself doing in our consulting work was to send along you know, 10 or 15 model provisions. Depending on what this controversial designer wanted to maximize, they could choose among these and select one. But what we realized was, you know, why should we be doing this? Consulting work and reinventing the wheel each time, Why not have an online repository of constitutions which was indexed in a really refined way that allowed people to pull out excerpts on any given topic. So we took that idea and we started thinking about it. And like academics, we started writing proposals to get grant funding for it. Um, and that developed the idea further. Ah, I ultimately shop this around to Google, which of course, knows a little something about search, and so is the natural partner for this kind of project. And they were really interested. And we ended up partnering with a part of Google, which is a really exciting, which is Google ideas. And it essentially is this sort of the think do tank of Google and ah, working with them was really pleasure. They had all sorts of ideas on the substantive side, but of course, a lot of engineering support and they helped fund the project here a Texas, and it was just a really nice partnership. [0:06:12 Speaker 3] So one of the first things that jumps out to me is, ah, this idea that there people out there kind of actively drafting constitutions. And this is something that that’s happening now and happening frequently, which I don’t know if Ahmad in this way, but kind of surprises me. I kind of think of constitutions being ridden very infrequently. Are there lots of people out there right now actively writing constitutions? [0:06:37 Speaker 2] Eso Still, you’re not alone in thinking that people are always surprised about how often constitutional turnover happens. And we discovered this a real formal way because one of the first things we did with our data was to look at the life span of constitutions. So Tom and I wrote this book with James Melton in which we took our chronology of events and try to identify how long constitutions last and what the conditions were that led to ah ah to constitutional demise. And, um, we discovered that constitutions last on average about 19 years before they’re replaced and their revised almost constantly in many countries. So on average, about four or five constitutions, we replace a year, and some 30 or 40 will be amended in smaller ways each year. So it’s It is surprising that that much activity is going on, which makes this whole business a lot more interesting. [0:07:35 Speaker 3] Robert, if we could turn to you for a 2nd 1 of the things that I love about this project is how much Zach has incorporated. Ah, pretty large group of graduate students into the research and and into the project. Tell us a little bit about that, how you got involved in it, what you do. [0:07:54 Speaker 1] Well, I mean, I couldn’t agree more. The project has been a ton of fun, it said, as a graduate student, and the sort of community that’s grown up around this project has been huge for me, both sort of professionally and socially. As a grad student I got involved in Constitute, I worked for Zach this semester before I started in graduate school over the summer, doing some of the coding work that Zack mentioned earlier reading and sort of coding data from constitutions Pretty early on, during my first year, Zack was sort of batting around some ideas about how we might go about turning that hand coated and text into sort of machine readable data at a little bit of a programming background in my undergraduate that turned into probably had pushing a year’s worth of work. That was really a huge learning experience for me. We had to sort of extract structure of all these constitutions. Constitutions are these sort of systematic documents that are organized into chapters and articles, entitles me to extract all that information. We had Teoh connect sort of conceptual tags to the right locations and tax free to do all of these fairly complicated computational tasks. And I think that you mentioned that sort of the project has kind of, ah group feel, which I think is totally true. My father was a biology professor, and so my image of academia has always been the lab in the lab group. And I think constitute is the closest ever seen toe to the lab in the social sciences. And it’s it’s really wonderful, and it’s something that not everybody gets to experience in graduate school. What [0:09:23 Speaker 3] are you specifically working on in the project right now? [0:09:27 Speaker 2] So at some point when we launched constitute, we got in touch or the people of the National Constitution Center got in touch with us because they’ve been following what we’re doing. And I started talking about to the director there, Jeffrey Rosen. Then we realized that we had a lot of areas of cooperation that would be interesting to pursue. How does the U. S Constitution compared to other constitutions in various ways? So Ah, Jeff Rosen and I were talking about how we might use the compare of constitutions, project data and the constant data to actually do some of those analyses. So one point we said, You know what? Why don’t we? The National Constitution Center has this amazing museum exhibit on the U. S. Constitution. Why don’t we develop some Visual Interactive’s online, but then also on these really big screens to show some of our data. And Robert was the principal person on that project, working night and day with people the visualization lab at the Texas Ah Advanced Computing Centre, which is amazing place. It has screens the size of jumbotrons. I think at one point had the biggest screen in the world s o. All this to basically show data that you couldn’t see otherwise And so we started working with them, developed these interactive’s, [0:10:43 Speaker 1] and all of that was sort of fascinating stuff, both technically and and as sort of ah design experience and a a sort of outreach experience in the visualization lab, which is a visualization lab, is mostly interested in sort of taking data that sort of hard to think about or hard to imagine a lot of their workers with biomedical people who have, you know, giant genomic data sets or final genetic data sets of sort of trees of life for things like that that people want to display visually and using sort of visualizations to help people develop research questions that sort of their mission. And so they were very interested in in turning to sort of social science data and how one might use visualizations toe, get research questions out of fat. And so we developed a number of of sort of visualizations. Probably the most fun one for us was what we called the Wheel of Rights. If you can imagine a big wheel up on a screen, you could spin and and see sort of rights begin to populate the wheel of a sort of time float onwards for the museum for their for their at least their initial exhibit. They wanted something a little more sort of focused on the on the U. S. Setting in particular. And so for them, there were sort of to mean, ah, products that we built for them. One was what we called an edit flow diagram. So the U. S. Bill of rights is debated in Congress, and there’s a lot of documentary history on versions of the Bill of Rights that were proposed and of each amendment. This sort of, you know, amendment history of the amendments, as it were. And we wanted to sort of show the process by which the text was developed. So on the Second Amendment, for example, the right to bear arms there were a number of virgins propose, some of which gave a very sort of circumscribed version of the right to bear arms, where it was very explicitly focused on on militia is in sort of defense of this state and others that restricted right to bear arms to very specific purposes, like hunting or that sort of thing. And so you can sort of learn interesting things about kind of that, you know, ideas that were proposed and rejected, and other ways that those amendments might have looked. The other visualization we we provided was when it was more comparative. Ah, sort of a world map visuals issue. Call it rights around the world that let people see which countries possess the rights that were better containing the in the U. S. Bill of rights. So which countries were sort of the closest in terms of their sort of general themes and and content to the U. S. Bill of rights? That was a fun one. It’s sort of it. It’s an entryway into seeing, you know, the way that sort of constitutional rights look around the world and in sort of a wayto to see that the sort of more detailed stuff that we have on the constitutes site in a sort of map visualisation form, which sort of is a nice way to get at the data and a kind of the museum setting. [0:13:40 Speaker 2] I think one thing that was really interesting and fun for both Robert and I was in some ways Thea outreach aspect of all this because, of course, we all you know We’re mostly spending our time writing papers and rarely, if it all would we have the chance to actually have our work somewhere in a museum, especially in the National Constitution Center, which somebody described to me recently is the Disneyland for constitutional junkies. And, uh, that’s pretty apt description. But right now, through our cooperation of the National Constitution Center, we now have a major part of their exhibit devoted to our website. And so we have this constitute area where people can go play on these tablets and play on our website. But the other thing we have, um, is on the screens. It we have this rights interactive area, and there somebody can go and play with our visualizations, and we now have our data and our analyses on a museum floor somewhere, and that’s a really exciting thing, I think for both of us. I remember when this was unveiled the National Constitution Center. It was kind of a big deal. Hey, we had one Supreme Court justice give the keynote address. Um, the governor of Pennsylvania was there. Jeb Bush introduced the whole thing. It’s a nonpartisan venture. They’re, but they’re had was a star studded group of Republicans and Democrats introducing our interactive and that is part of the museum. So that was really fun for the two of us. Actually, See, ah are working our data in action with people like that. And then I’m gonna take a crack if I can, of describing also some of these visualizations right which are on the cutting room floor. So Robert talked about two visualizations that are actually on the museum floor. But there’s a lot more that ended up on the cutting room floor. And this wheel of Rights, which Robert was describing, is one of those. And that’s really a cool thing where somebody could see where and when certain rights under which categories existed in the world. And you can go and you can spin this wheel on the wedges on the wheel slices of this big pie or wheel our countries, and then there little bits and pieces of the pie that air the rights and you can tap those and expand them. Ah, you can go through time really nicely, and the whole, I think, sort of these trends jump out to you in a really interesting way and of course you can tap rights and see what a particular Countries excerpt pertaining to that, right? Actually says. And that’s really fun. There’s a second visualization, which also ended up on the cutting room floor, which is the thing that we sometimes called raining rights. And that was supposed to show when rights evolved and so you could see rights as these bubbles coming down from the top of the screen. Um, and the bubbles would get bigger as more in countries would adopt that right? The bubbles would sometimes pop if it were are right. That actually went out of existence, which is really rare. But you got a sense of, um, how popular certain rights were and when across the world in this really cool, interactive way, you could go and you could take the bubble and you could slam it against other bubbles and they would ricochet off other bubbles. And so kids loved it. It worked for three year olds, and it worked for 95 year olds. It was a lot of fun. [0:16:54 Speaker 3] Yeah, one thing, though, that that kind of comes out in thinking through your discussion of the visualization. I mean, other than it does sound like a lot of fun, and all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense that this would be in a museum, right? Kind of thinking. And again, it sort of breaks the, I think stereotype for lack of a better word of constitutions being stale and old and just sort of this piece of parchment paper calligraphy. But this is like I feel like I’m in a science museum, right? Like with the big bubble things of just listening to talk about it Sounds fun. Uh, so they’re really, [0:17:28 Speaker 2] really jealous. I think of the hard sciences and how they can have this fun stuff in science museums. And so it’s about time, the Constitution the other day. [0:17:37 Speaker 0] Thanks for listening to this first episode of the Connector way. Hope you enjoyed what you heard and will tune in for Part two, where we dive deeper into data visualization. If you have any questions or comments, you can find me at go dot utexas dot edu