Institutions and Social Structures

Monarchy

Political and Legal Institutions

Monarchy is a form of government in which a single person, the monarch, holds supreme or ceremonial authority over a state, typically for life and typically transmitted through hereditary succession within a ruling family, a form of political organization documented across nearly every world region and among the oldest recorded forms of centralized political authority. Monarchies vary widely in the actual scope of the monarch's power: an absolute monarchy vests essentially unconstrained governing authority in the monarch, historically exemplified by early modern states such as France under Louis XIV, while a constitutional monarchy limits the monarch's power under a constitution or body of law, typically to largely ceremonial and symbolic functions, with actual governing authority held by an elected parliament and government, a form adopted across most surviving European monarchies since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Succession to a monarchy has historically followed various rules, including primogeniture favoring the eldest child, election among eligible candidates as in some elective monarchies, or rotation among designated royal houses, and monarchy has coexisted historically with, and given rise to, many more specific institutional forms, including sacred kingship, dual kingship, and various hereditary noble hierarchies subordinate to the crown. As of the early twenty-first century a substantial minority of the world's sovereign states, concentrated particularly in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Oceania, retain a reigning monarch, the great majority as constitutional rather than absolute monarchies.

Facts

Institution Typethe subject's own account

Political institution: a hereditary form of government in which a single monarch holds headship of state, typically for life. 1

Emergence Periodthe subject's own account

Preceded by prehistoric chiefdom and tribal kingship; among the earliest recorded monarchies are those of Pharaoh Narmer of Egypt around 3100 BCE and Sumerian King Enmebaragesi of Kish around 2600 BCE. 1

Institution Typethe subject's own account

Political Regime 1

Scalethe subject's own account

National 1

Membership Basisthe subject's own account

Birth 1

Connections

Associated With

Barrington Moore Jr.

Moore Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy traced how different coalitions among landed monarchy, peasantry and bourgeoisie produced divergent routes to the modern state.

Diarchy (Dual Kingship)

Diarchy, rule shared between two co-equal monarchs, is a documented variant institutional form of monarchy, found in ancient Sparta's dual kingship and elsewhere.

Personal Union

Personal union is an institution specific to monarchy, in which one monarch simultaneously holds the separate crowns of two or more otherwise distinct states.

Sacred Kingship

Sacred kingship is a documented institutional variant of monarchy in which the ruler's authority is understood as religious or divinely derived rather than, or in addition to, purely secular or hereditary right.

Sultanate

Sultanate is a specific historical form of monarchical rule under a sultan, used across many historical Muslim polities from the medieval Seljuk period onward.

Zulu

The Zulu Kingdom, consolidated under Shaka in the early nineteenth century, was organized as a centralized monarchy with the Zulu king (isilo) at its head, a role that continues in ceremonial form today.

In the Other Atlases