A monarchy is a state ruled by an individual who has a position at the apex of an aristocratic pyramid of honour and authority which is generally inherited through a family connection. Monarchy is a very ancient system of government (it was, indeed, one of Aristotle’s three basic forms of good government, along with aristocracy and democracy) which developed independently in various continents; many monarchial systems seem to have started with some form of election, with the succession later becoming hereditary by primogeniture and, until recent decades, usually male primogeniture. Now that we have elected rulers of other types, the notion of an elected monarch would seem superfluous. In many cases the monarch would be endowed with some form of religious significance, for example as the person chosen by God to head and protect the church in their nation (see divine right), or even with a form of godhead themself.
The most common form of monarchy today is constitutional monarchy, where the monarch has strictly limited powers and must accept the role and power of other bodies, such as parliaments and cabinets. Constitutional monarchies are found particularly in Northern Europe, where there are seven (Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom; in addition, the British monarch is head of state of 16 other Commonwealth members). A constitutional monarchy was reintroduced in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975. The constitutional monarch typically has a residual role to play in helping the formation of new governments after an election, or in granting to the government the authority to dissolve parliament and call an election, much as have many presidents in systems where the president is head of state.
In some countries, Sweden being the best example, even these residual powers have been stripped away. It would be wrong to dismiss entirely the potential political significance of monarchy. In some countries, the UK, Norway and the Netherlands being good examples, the symbolic authority is very high among certain sectors. Few military officers, for example, take entirely lightly the idea that their commissions come from the monarch, and might show much more loyalty to a king or queen than to a government, given the military distaste for politics, were a clash to arise. More generally monarchs as heads of state serve as a more clearly neutral symbol of national unity, and a focus for citizen loyalty, than do presidents. Monarchist tendencies have not entirely died out among ultra-traditionalist and conservative elements in European countries that have dispensed with them; in particular, there has been a monarchist resurgence in some Eastern European countries since the collapse of communism there in the late 1980s. The monarchies which have survived in Europe look likely to continue, if only because they provide a convenient way to separate the head of state role from the head of government, and because they remain popular with their subjects; in such countries the royal families regularly gain extremely high support in public opinion polls. However, especially in the United Kingdom, the public standing of royal families is vulnerable to their private behaviour, because the values society feels it needs them to espouse are in fact very different from the values by which much of society lives. The more ‘ordinary’ a monarchy becomes, the less support it gets in practice, although at the same time, egalitarian views in society run against the idea of a distant and superior monarchy.
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