Monarchies benefit the economy and provide high standards of living

The argument

In the long-term, monarchies are very beneficial for the economy and the overall standard of living. Professor of management at The Wharton School, Mauro Guillen, published a new study which found that from 1900 to 2010, monarchies were better than republics at protecting the property rights of businesses and individuals. Greater protection of property rights means higher GDP per capita. The conceptual examination and data analysis of the researchers support the claim that today's monarchies have gone through historical procedures of legalization which have led many of them to provide extra protections of property rights. Guillen's study shows that monarchies are better than republics at protecting property rights because they can lessen the adverse consequences of internal conflict, executive tenure (politicians staying in power), and executive discretion (politicians not being checked and balanced). To protect property rights, the adverse effects of these three phenomena must be counterbalanced or nullified. If they remain active in the social and political system, then there will be significantly less protection of property rights. Guillen's study shows that democratic-constitutional monarchies are best at countervailing the negative effects of all three of these phenomena. They can mitigate internal conflict, enjoin views on politicians that are best in the long-term, and strategically restrain the executive office. In trying to countervail the last of the three phenomena (executive discretion), Queen Elizabeth of the U.K. has checked the nation's prime ministers whenever they appeared to exceed their rightful remit. When businesses and individuals know that their property rights are safeguarded—that the government will not misuse, violate, or seize their property, including their intellectual property—they are more enthusiastic about investing in the economy, creating new jobs, and initiating projects that support the economy.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Guillen has shown in the same study that parliamentary republics, as opposed to presidential republics, offer a high level of protection of property rights. Countries like Germany, which is a parliamentary republic, effectively protect property rights and thereby guarantee economic advancement and high standards of living. Presidential republics do not have the best track record of protecting property rights; the U.S. is the exception and not the common case. So not all republics deliver great results, but some do, and this is just the case with monarchies. Democratic-constitutional monarchies like U.K., Sweden, and Denmark are very effective at countervailing the adverse effects of executive tenure and executive discretion, but undemocratic monarchies like Morocco or those in the Middle East are not as effective. Not every country in the world can successfully establish or adopt a monarchical form of government. Guillen makes it clear that the results of his study show that monarchies provide economic benefits and higher standards of living when they are legitimate—when they have a foundation and a history behind them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The study is read past what it reports. A cross-national association between monarchy and property-rights protection across a century is correlational, and the monarchies surviving through that period are concentrated among wealthy, stable, mostly northern European states and the constitutional monarchies of the Commonwealth — so the comparison is partly between rich countries and everything else. The second step, from property rights to GDP per capita, is a separate finding stacked on the first. [Rejecting P2] The proposed mechanism does not fit the cases. Constitutional monarchs check executives only in a formal and rarely exercised sense, and the example given is anecdotal: a sovereign's private influence is not the sort of constraint that secures property rights, which in these states is done by independent courts and parliaments. The counter's point follows directly — parliamentary republics with the same institutions achieve the same protection without a crown. [Rejecting C] The conclusion also generalises from a subset. The monarchies that support it are constitutional and parliamentary, while the world's absolute monarchies are among the weakest performers on the measures the argument uses, which suggests it is the parliamentary part rather than the monarchy doing the work.