The US Constitution

UK Politics Fundamentals opened with a real, load-bearing distinction: the UK's constitution is "uncodified" — real, but scattered across statutes, court cases, and unwritten conventions rather than collected in a single document. This course opens on the exact opposite structural fact: the United States has a single, physical, written constitution — and, per Wikipedia's own precise wording, it is "the oldest and longest-standing written and codified national constitution in force in the world." That single sentence is this chapter's own real starting point.

From the Articles of Confederation to Philadelphia

The Constitution wasn't the country's first governing document. The Articles of Confederation, in force from 1781, created a deliberately weak national government — Congress could not levy taxes, regulate interstate commerce, or enforce its own laws on individual citizens. By the mid-1780s that weakness was widely seen as a genuine crisis, and delegates from twelve of the thirteen states (Rhode Island abstained) convened in Philadelphia to fix it.

The Constitutional Convention ran from May 25 to September 17, 1787, meeting at Independence Hall. What the delegates produced went well beyond a patch — a wholly new framework of government — and the finished document was signed on September 17, 1787.

Ratification: Nine of Thirteen

Signing the document in Philadelphia didn't make it law. Article VII set the bar for ratification deliberately high but not unanimous: nine of the thirteen states had to ratify it in state conventions before it would take effect among those states. New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify on 21 June 1788, clearing that threshold. The new government took effect on 4 March 1789, the date the first Congress convened; George Washington was inaugurated as the first President on 30 April 1789.

The Seven Original Articles

The Constitution's own text is organized into seven Articles, each covering a distinct structural question. Later chapters return to most of these in real depth — this table is the map for the rest of the course.

Article V: How the Document Itself Changes

Article V is worth its own section because it is the mechanism every other structural fact in this course ultimately answers to — and because, deliberately, it makes formal change hard. There are two ways to propose an amendment, and two ways to ratify one, and in over two centuries only one combination of the four has ever actually been used.

Every one of the 27 amendments in force today — including all ten of the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791 — was proposed by Congress and ratified by state legislatures. The convention-based route in the right-hand column has never once been successfully completed. That's a real, verifiable outcome of the threshold itself: two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states is a genuinely high bar, deliberately designed to require broad, cross-partisan and cross-regional consensus rather than a narrow majority.

Codified vs. Uncodified, Side by Side

UK Politics Fundamentals Chapter 1 established that the UK constitution rests on four real sources — Acts of Parliament, court cases, constitutional conventions, and works of authority — with no single document holding them all. The table below puts that finding directly next to what this chapter has just covered.

Notice what this table does not say: it doesn't say one system is more stable or more democratic than the other — only that they solve the same underlying problem (how does a country change its own rulebook?) in genuinely different, verifiable ways. The rest of this course keeps drawing this same UK-vs-US contrast at exactly the points where the two systems structurally diverge, rather than repeating Political Theory Fundamentals' own general comparative-government material from scratch.

Hands-On Exercises