Exercise 3: Why the Third Duma's Full Term Doesn't Prove the System Became More Secure — Possible Solution
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This exercise is asking you to distinguish "the Duma survived longer"
from "the Duma became genuinely more powerful," and explain why the
first doesn't imply the second here.

WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED BETWEEN THE SECOND AND THIRD DUMAS
The Third Duma didn't survive longer because the government had
granted it more real power or independence. It survived because the
government had just rewritten the electoral law - after dissolving its
predecessor without the Duma's own required consent - specifically to
produce a more compliant, less oppositional body. Representation for
national minorities was sharply reduced, while the nobility and large
landowners gained disproportionate influence over who got elected.

WHY LONGER SURVIVAL IS THE WRONG MEASURE OF GENUINE POWER
A parliament that survives because its own membership has been
engineered to rarely challenge the government isn't demonstrating that
the system has become more tolerant of genuine opposition or more
respectful of the Duma's own institutional role - it's demonstrating
the opposite: that the government retained enough unchecked power to
simply reshape who sat in the Duma until conflict became less likely.
The Third Duma's own real legislative record supports this reading
directly - it passed Stolypin's land-reform program, which the
government itself wanted, but achieved comparatively little else,
consistent with a body less inclined to press for changes the
government opposed.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR JUDGING THE DUMA SYSTEM OVERALL
If the Duma's own survival depended on first neutering its ability to
produce genuine opposition, then its longer lifespan under the new
rules is evidence of the government's continued dominance, not
evidence that the Duma itself had gained real, lasting institutional
standing. The underlying balance of power - the Tsar's veto, dissolution
authority, and control of the bureaucracy and military - remained
exactly what the 1906 Fundamental Laws had already established.

ANSWER: The Third Duma's full term reflects a more compliant, engineered
electorate rather than a genuinely more secure or powerful parliament -
its survival was a direct consequence of the same unchecked decree
power that dissolved its predecessor and rewrote the electoral rules,
not a sign that the underlying structural limits on the Duma's own
authority had changed in any real way.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It separates institutional survival from institutional power
explicitly, and ties the Third Duma's own cooperative behavior directly
back to the engineered electoral law that produced it, rather than
treating its longer term as self-evidently a positive development.