The constitution as symbol or operating manual: A rejoinder on constitutional literacy

• Main Authors: JONES, Brian Christopher, VISSER, De Maartje
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: constitutional literacy; constitutional idolatry; constitutions; comparative constitutional law; civic education; legal symbols; Constitutional Law
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4539; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/6497/viewcontent/Constitution_Rejoinder_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Assessing constitutional functionality often brings forward questions that go to the heart of the constitutional project, and this is certainly the case with constitutional literacy. After all, constitutions serve as national symbols and in a related vein, some have even likened them to a country’s autobiography. As Mounk points out, constitutional values and civic cultures have at times defined democracies, and many states have used their founding documents as key symbols to produce a shared identity or civic patriotism. At the same time, constitutions will also set out the legal and political structures of, and constraints on, institutions, and as such, are akin to operating manuals. Many would expect these documents to seamlessly traverse the boundaries between the symbolic and the operational, as if the barrier between these two potentially diverging functions is pliable and easily negotiated. Exploring the themes of constitutional idolatry and constitutional literacy demonstrates that this fluid nature of various forms of constitutional functionality may not actually be so seamless. Indeed, addressing these themes raises difficult questions about how we think about constitutions, what we should expect of them, and also gives rise to implications for how citizens use and interact with these texts. Those themes of literacy and idolatry are the frame of this special issue and their interplay is explored in the various contributions that make up the collection, including in this rejoinder.