The surprising advantage of the British monarchy

The weather was wet, the eyes dry, and the hats had no equal in the modern world. In the end, the coronation of King Charles III was about as British as anything British has ever been.

In the meantime, every aspect of the ceremony, clothing, attendees and personal dramas has been dissected and analyzed in minute detail. But the larger question underlying the whole bitch received surprisingly little attention: namely, what is the point of the British monarchy?

We’re all familiar with the usual explanations: tradition, pride, tourism revenue, exciting celebrity news supporting the tabloid industry. (And the usual answers: the traditions and pride have been bought at a high price of blood and pain, especially in the colonies; the tourists come for the palaces rather than the people; and the famous royal industrial complex is cruel to many involved, especially those who had no choice whether or not to be born into it.)

But I think the more interesting answer has to do with the role the monarchy has played in helping Britain solve a vital dilemma at the heart of the modern state: how do you design a strong enough political system to give everyone an incentive to participate in but not so strong as to become tyrannical and drive people to overthrow it.

This is a difficult balance to achieve! And history is full of examples of what happens when it goes too far in one direction or the other.

In a famous magazine, the theorist Mancur Olson, who studied how states were formed, wrote that there is a fundamental problem at the heart of dictatorship and unrestricted monarchy when the leader did not expect to hold power indefinitely or pass it on to his descendants.

The leader would then have reason to drain resources from the state as quickly as possible, even if it undermined productivity and stability – to get in and out while getting it right. (For a modern example of what that looks like, just search “kleptocracy”.)

That is bad for the country in question, which is left with escalating cycles of political instability and economic crises. For most of history, the imperfect solution was to make power hereditary, because a ruler who expected to pass the kingdom on to his child would want to keep it healthy. But that had some obvious drawbacks, most notably the job of king often did not go to the most qualified or able candidate. And poor leaders, of course, can create their own problems.

Democracy addresses those problems by making politics a repetitive game. Since elections are held regularly, everyone expects their team to win some of the time and lose some of the time. But that gives the contestants a reason to hold on and play by the rules: if you know you could lose, you want to know you’ll have a chance to win afterward.

As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in “How democracies die”, restraint is a crucial element of democratic longevity. In a healthy system, politicians do not exercise power in ways that conflict with the spirit of the law or the norms of the political system, even if they technically and legally could, because they know it is in their interest to system to function.

But often the parties polarize and that restraint breaks. Parties begin to treat each round of the game as if it were an all-or-nothing venture, playing political hardball to keep their opponents out of power. In the United States, for example, when the Republican Party refused to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat until after the 2016 election, it was a legal exercise of power. But it was a profound departure from American political norms.

After too much of that hostile, unfettered exercise of power, parties and politicians begin to lose interest in continuing the game. Democracies are becoming fragile and often disintegrate into quasi-authoritarian regimes or even dictatorships.

In Chile, Levitsky and Ziblatt write, democratic cooperation deteriorated during the Cold War and standards of restraint crumbled under pressure. Eventually, a faction of politicians on the right left democracy, overthrew the government in a coup and installed a dictatorship that lasted 17 years.

It is easy to forget, but the current role of the British monarchy is in many ways a response to a similar problem. In the 17th century, King Charles I’s attempt to play political hardball with an uncooperative parliament led to a revolution (and his eventual execution).

After the restoration of the Stuart kings and then the Glorious Revolution that enthroned William and Mary in 1689, no political faction was strong enough to hold power on its own, and no one wanted to give the restored monarchy enough power to an opponent.

So the best option for all factions, Olson wrote“was to agree on the preponderance of a parliament that included them all and to make insurance against the power of the others through an independent judiciary and a Bill of Rights.”

Over time, the monarch became almost a rudimentary body: there to observe and advise political decisions, but never participate in them. But the fact that still there used to be a monarch, even a greatly curtailed and weakened one, meant there was no need to create a new head of state, such as a president. That meant that Britain avoided the dangers of presidentialism, which many political scientists now regard as one particularly unstable form of democracy.

And the unusual role of the British monarch has also created obvious barriers for those who want to play political hardball.

Last year, for example, when Boris Johnson tried to survive his party’s attempts to oust him as prime minister, hinted heavily that he might try to call an early general election to win a new public mandate. Such actions would have been a significant breach of British political norms, which allow parties to form a new government after ousting their own leaders.

But to carry out that plan, Johnson would have needed the Queen to call the election. And while custom may have prevented her from actually refusing a direct request from the prime minister, there are other ways to hold back. According to a recent bookinformed her advisers that if Johnson asked her for a new election, she would not have been available to answer the phone that day.

And restraint leads to restraint. Johnson doesn’t seem to have even tried. Instead, he announced his resignation the next day.

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