Isla Campbell on Republic, Polling on the Monarchy, and Why Democratic Legitimacy and Emotional Attachment Are Different Arguments That Keep Getting Conflated
Britain does not debate the monarchy. Not really. Not in the way that mature democracies debate their fundamental institutions when those institutions raise legitimate questions about democratic legitimacy, cost, and the alignment of inherited privilege with contemporary values. What Britain does instead is conduct a sustained, ongoing, occasionally heated discussion about the Royal Family — about individual members, specific decisions, particular expenditures — while systematically declining to address the prior question of whether the institution itself is the appropriate framework for a modern democracy in the twenty-first century. The question is not whether Charles or William or any specific royal is good at their job. The question is whether the job itself should exist in its current constitutional form. This question is rarely asked directly and almost never answered.
Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state, has been making the republican case for decades with considerable intellectual consistency and limited political traction. The polling data is interesting: support for the monarchy is consistently majority in surveys, but the majority is smaller among younger respondents and has declined across all age groups since the 1990s. Support for the monarchy correlates more strongly with age than with politics — it is not a left-right question in the way that most constitutional questions become. It is a generational question wearing political clothes.
The Democratic Legitimacy Argument
The republican case rests primarily on democratic legitimacy: that a head of state in a democracy should be chosen by the people it represents rather than appointed by the accident of birth, and that the existing arrangement — however benign in practice — is in principle incompatible with democratic values that Britain claims to embody and export. The monarchist response typically combines the emotional attachment argument (which is real and not irrational but is not a democratic legitimacy argument) with the functional argument (which is also real — the monarchy does provide constitutional stability and soft power). The problem is that these are different arguments and the debate rarely separates them clearly enough to allow the democratic legitimacy question to be addressed on its own terms. Britain probably should have this conversation. It probably will not have it during the current reign. More analysis at The London Prat.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
