Conclusions

Although monarchy is not the main political institution in which political decisions are made today in the world, it has a profound historical impact on where political power rests in a state, how elected political figures behave, and how the political system of a state is shaped. This book has demonstrated how power is distributed between a monarch and the parliament, what leads to institutional divergence between absolute monarchies, constitutional monarchies, and republics as a result of this power distribution, and when and why constitutional monarchs transgress their constitutional constraints despite accepting a given power distribution system with the parliament. This conclusion summarizes the book’s findings and discusses their implication for the roles of constitutional monarchy in the democratic age. It also discusses how the findings contribute to our understanding of the role of unelected political actors, including monarchs, in the contemporary world and suggests the directions for future research.