Skip to main content
Intended for healthcare professionals

Abstract

Monarchy was the dominant form of rule in the pre-modern era and it persists in a handful of countries. We propose a unified theoretical explanation for its rise and decline. Specifically, we argue that monarchy offers an efficient solution to the primordial problem of order where societies are large and citizens isolated from each other and hence have difficulty coordinating. Its efficiency is challenged by other methods of leadership selection when communication costs decline, lowering barriers to citizen coordination. This explains its dominance in the pre-modern world and its subsequent demise. To test this theory, we produce an original dataset that codes monarchies and republics in Europe (back to 1100) and the world (back to 1700). With this dataset, we test a number of observable implications of the theory—centering on territory size, political stability, tenure in office, conflict, and the role of mass communications in the modern era.

Get full access to this article

View all access and purchase options for this article.

References

Acharya A., Lee A. (2019). Path dependence in European development: Medieval politics, conflict, and state building. Comparative Political Studies, 52(13–14), 2171–2206.
Anckar C., Fredriksson C. (2016). Political regimes of the world, 1800-2015. Database, department of political science. Åbo Akademi University.
Anderson B. (1991a). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (revised ed.). Verso.
Anderson L. (1991b). Absolutism and the resilience of monarchy in the Middle East. Political Science Quarterly, 106(1), 1–15.
Anderson L. (2000). Dynasts and nationalists: Why monarchies survive. In Kostiner J. (Eds.), Middle East Monarchies (pp. 53–69). Westview.
Aquinas St. T. (2012). De Regno: On kingship to the king of Cyprus, translated by Phelan G. B., revised by I. Th. Eschmann, O. P. (Kindle Edition). Veritatis Splendor Publications.
Ayalon A. (2000). Post-Ottoman Arab monarchies: Old bottles, new labels? In Kostiner J (Ed.), Middle East Monarchies. Westview.
Bendix R. (1980). Kings or people: Power and the Mandate to Rule. University of California Press.
Blain N., O’Donnell H. (Eds). (2001). Media, monarchy and power: The postmodern culture in Europe. Intellect.
Bodin J. (1955). Six Books of the Commonwealth, abridged and translated by Tooley M. J. Basil Blackwell.
Burbank J., Cooper F. (2010). Empires in world history: Power and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press.
Burling R. (1974). The passage of power: Studies in political succession. Academic Press.
Carter D. B., Signorino C. S. (2010). Back to the future: Modeling time dependence in binary data. Political Analysis, 18(3), 271–292.
Castro J. J. (2013). Wireless: Radio, revolution, and the Mexican State, 1897-1938. The University of Oklahoma Press.
Cheibub J. A., Gandhi J., Vreeland J. R. (2010). Democracy and dictatorship revisited. Public Choice, 143(1–2), 67–101.
Coppedge M., Gerring J., Lindberg S. I., Skaaning S-E., Teorell J., Altman D., Bernhard M., Fish M. S., Glynn A., Hicken A., Knutsen C. H., Marquardt K. L., McMann K., Mechkova V., Paxton P., Pemstein D., Saxer L., Seim B., Sigman R., Staton J. (2017). Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Codebook v7.1. University of Gothenburg, V-Dem Institute.
Crone P. (1989). Pre-industrial societies: Anatomy of the pre-modern world. Oneworld.
Davison W. P. (1965). International political communication. Council on Foreign Relations.
Dawkins R. (1978). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
de Solorzano Pereira J. (1776). Obras posthumas. Madrid.
Dincecco M., Onorato M. G. (2018). From warfare to wealth: The military origins of urban prosperity in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Djuve V., Knutsen C. H., Wig T. (2020). Patterns of regime breakdown since the French Revolution. Comparative Political Studies, 53(6), 923–958.
Duindam J. (2016). Dynasties: A global history of power, 1300-1800. Cambridge University Press.
Elias N. (1983). The court society. Basil Blackwell.
Elliott J. H. (2009). Spain, Europe and the Wider World, 1500-1800. Yale University Press.
Ezrow N. M., Frantz E. (2011). Dictators and dictatorships: Understanding authoritarian regimes and their leaders. Bloomsbury.
Fawtier R. (1960). The Capetian Kings of France (trans. Butler L., Adam R.). Saint Martin’s Press.
Filmer R. (1991). Patriarcha and other writings, (ed.), Sommerville J. P. Cambridge University Press.
Gause E. G. (1994). Oil monarchies: Domestic and security challenges in the Arab Gulf States. Council on Foreign Relations.
Gause E. G. (2000). The persistence of monarchy in the Arabian peninsula: A comparative analysis. In Kostiner J. (ed.), Middle East Monarchies (pp. 167–186). Westview.
Geddes B., Frantz E., Wright J. (2014). Autocratic breakdown and regime transitions: A new data set. Perspectives on Politics, 12(2), 313–331.
Gerring J, Wig T., Tollefsen A. F., Apfeld B. (2018). Harbors and democracy. Varieties of Democracy Working Paper SERIES 2018:70.
Gleditsch K. S., Ward M. D. (1999). A revised list of independent states since the Congress of Vienna. International Interactions, 25(4), 393–413.
Goody J., Thirsk J., Thompson E. P. (eds). (1979). Family and inheritance: Rural society in Western Europe, 1200-1800. Cambridge University Press.
Grossman H. I. (2002). Make us a king’: Anarchy, predation, and the state. European Journal of Political Economy, 18(1), 31–46.
Habermas J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press.
Hale J. A. S. (1975). Radio power: Propaganda and international broadcasting. Paul Elek.
Headrick D. R. (2000). When information came of age: Technologies of knowledge in the age of reason and revolution, 1700-1850. Oxford University Press.
Herb M. (1999). All in the family: Absolutism, revolution, and democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies. SUNY Press.
Hibbert C. (1968). Charles I. Weidenfeld, Nicolson.
Huntington S. P. (1966). The political modernization of traditional monarchies. Daedalus, 95(3), 763–788.
Huntington S. P. (1968). Political order in changing societies. Yale University Press.
Jones D. (2013). The plantagenets: The warrior kings and queens who made England. Penguin.
Kantorowicz E. (1957). The king’s two bodies: A study in medieval political theology. Princeton University Press.
Karawan I. A. (1992). Monarchs, Mullas, and Marshals: Islamic regimes? Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 524(1), 103–119.
Kechichian J. A. (2001). Succession in Saudi Arabia. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kiser E., Barzel Y. (1989). The origins of democracy in England. Rationality and Society, 3(4), 396–422.
Knutsen C. H., Teorell J., Wig T., Cornell A., Gerring J., Gjerløw H., Skaaning S-E., Ziblatt D., Marquardt K. L., Pemstein D., Seim B. (2019). Introducing the historical varieties of democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century. Journal of Peace Research, 56(3), 440–451.
Kokkonen A., Sundell A. (2014). Delivering stability: Primogeniture and autocratic survival in European monarchies 1000–1800. American Political Science Review, 108(2), 438–453.
Krieger L. (1970). Kings and philosophers 1689-1789. W.W. Norton.
Kuper H. (1986). The Swazi: A South African Kingdom. Holt, Rinehart, Winston.
Lachaud F., Penman M. (eds.). (2008). Making and breaking the rules: Succession in Medieval Europe, c. 1000– c. 1600. Turnhout.
Lewis B. (2000). Monarchy in the Middle East. In Kostiner J. (ed.), Middle East Monarchies (pp. 167–186). Westview.
Lucas R. E. (2012). Rules and tools of succession in the Gulf Monarchies. Journal of Arabian Studies, 2(1), 75–91.
Magaloni B. (2008). Credible power-sharing and the longevity of authoritarian rule. Comparative Political Studies, 41(4–5), 715–741.
McDonagh E. (2015). Ripples from the first wave: The monarchical origins of the welfare state. Perspectives on Politics, 13(4): 992–1016.
Menaldo V. (2012). The Middle East and North Africa’s resilient monarchs. Journal of Politics, 74(3), 707–722.
Morrill J. (2004). Conclusion: King-killing in perspective. In von Friedeburg R. (ed.), Murder and monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300-1800 (pp. 293–299). Palgrave Macmillan.
Myers H. A. (1982). Medieval kingship. Nelson-Hall.
Nelson J. (1995). Kingship and royal government. In McKitterick R. (ed.), New Cambridge Medieval History (pp. 381–430). Cambridge University Press.
North D. C., Weingast B. R. (1989). Constitutions and commitment: The evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England. Journal of Economic History, 49(4), 803–832.
North D. C., Wallis J. J., Weingast B. (2009). Violence and social orders: A conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge University Press.
Nussli C. (2017). Euratlas historical atlas and gazetteer of Europe.
Olson M. (1993). Dictatorship, democracy, and development. American Political Science Review, 87(3), 567–576.
Parker B. J. (2011). The construction and performance of kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Journal of Anthropological Research, 67(3) 357–386.
Reynolds S. (1999). Government and community. In Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. (eds.), The New Cambridge Medieval History (pp. 86–112). Cambridge University Press
Sutherland I. (2001). From Warlords to Kings, c.e. 1-752: In search of military and political legitimacy in Germanic Societies. (PhD thesis). Department of History, Concordia University.
Teorell J., Lindberg S. I. (2015). The structure of the executive in authoritarian and democratic regimes: Regime dimensions across the globe, 1900-2014 (Working Paper No. 5). University of Gothenburg, Varieties of Democracy Institute.
Tilly C. (1985). War making and state making as organized crime. In Evans P. B., Rueschemeyer D., Skocpol T. (eds.), Bringing the state back in (pp. 169–191). Cambridge University Press
Veenendaal W. (2014). A big prince in a tiny realm: Smallness, monarchy, and political legitimacy in the principality of Liechtenstein. Swiss Political Science Review, 21(2), 333–349.
Wahman M., Teorell J., Hadenius A. (2013). Authoritarian regime types revisited: Updated data in comparative perspective. Contemporary Politics, 19(1), 19–34.
Webb H. (1968). The Japanese Imperial Institution in the Tokugawa Period. East Asian Institute Ser.
Weber M. (1904–05/1958). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Charles Scribner’s.
Weber M. (1987). Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich vol. I, II. University of California Press.
Wolf A. (1991). The family of dynasties in Medieval Europe: Dynasties, kingdoms and tochterstamme. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 12, 185–260.
Wright J. (2008). To invest or insure? How authoritarian time horizons impact foreign aid effectiveness. Comparative Political Studies, 41(7), 971–1000.

Biographies

John Gerring (PhD, University of California at Berkeley, 1993) is a professor of Government at University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches and conducts research on methodology and comparative politics. He is co-editor of Strategies for Social Inquiry, a book series at Cambridge University Press, and serves as co-PI of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and the Global Leadership Project (GLP).
Tore Wig is a professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. His research interests lie at the intersection between political violence and institutions, mass mobilization and autocratic politics.
Wouter Veenendaal is an assistant professor at the Institute of Political Science of Leiden University. His research focuses on the political effects of population size, and he is the author of Politics and Democracy in Microstates (2014) and Democracy in Small States: Persisting Against All Odds (2018).
Daniel Weitzel is a PhD candidate in comparative politics and methodology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the interaction of party and voter behavior and the information environment in multi-party elections.
Jan Teorell is a professor of political science at Lund University. He has twice won the Lijphart, Przeworski, and Verba Award for Best Dataset by the APSA Comparative Politics Section, and he is the author of Determinants of Democratization (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and co-author of Varieties of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2020). His work has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Democracy, Governance, Political Research Quarterly, and Studies in Comparative International Development. His research interests include political methodology, history and comparative politics, comparative democratization, corruption, and state-making.
Kyosuke Kikuta (PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2019) is an associate professor at the Osaka School of International Public Policy at Osaka University. His primary interest is the application of statistical methods and GIS data for better understandings about armed conflict. His articles are published or forthcoming in Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and others.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental Material

Please find the following supplemental material visualised and available to download via Figshare in the display box below. Where there are more than one item, you can scroll through each tab to see each separate item.

Please note all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is here associated with

File (cps-19-0300.r1.zip)
File (monarchy_35_long_version.docx)
File (monarchy_43_appendices.pdf)

Cite article

Cite article

Cite article

OR

Download to reference manager

If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice

Share options

Share

Share this article

Share with email
EMAIL ARTICLE LINK
Share on social media

Share access to this article

Sharing links are not relevant where the article is open access and not available if you do not have a subscription.

For more information view the Sage Journals article sharing page.

Information, rights and permissions

Information

Published In

Article first published online: July 12, 2020
Issue published: March 2021

Keywords

  1. monarchy
  2. republic
  3. democracy

Rights and permissions

© The Author(s) 2020.
Request permissions for this article.
Request Permissions

Authors

Affiliations

Wouter Veenendaal
Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands
Daniel Weitzel
University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA
Kyosuke Kikuta
Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

Notes

John Gerring, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, 158 W. 21st St. STOP A1800, Batts Hall 2.116, Austin, TX 78712-1704, USA. Email: [email protected]

Metrics and citations

Metrics

Journals metrics

This article was published in Comparative Political Studies.

VIEW ALL JOURNAL METRICS

Article usage*

Total views and downloads: 4442

*Article usage tracking started in December 2016


Altmetric

See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores



Articles citing this one

Receive email alerts when this article is cited

Web of Science: 7 view articles Opens in new tab

Crossref: 12

  1. Consolidating Progress: The Selection of Female Ministers in Autocraci...
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  2. Historical Political Economy: Past, Present, and Future
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  3. States of Emergency: In Whose Interest Are They Invoked?
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  4. East Asian Monarchy in Comparative Perspective
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  5. The Functions of Constitutional Monarchy: Why Kings and Queens Survive...
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  6. The clash of traditional values: opposition to female monarchs
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  7. Governance, natural resources rent, and infrastructure development: Ev...
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  8. Patterns of Transformation in Dual Executives
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  9. Classifying Political Regimes
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  10. The Perils of Authoritarian Presidentialism: Stumbling Towards Authori...
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar
  11. The Cool Water Effect: Geo-Climatic Origins of the West’s Emancipatory...
    Go to citation Crossref Google Scholar

Figures and tables

Figures & Media

Tables

View Options

Get access

Access options

If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:


Alternatively, view purchase options below:

Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.

Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.

View options

PDF/ePub

View PDF/ePub

Full Text

View Full Text