On the Constitutional Logic of Hereditary Monarchy and Why It Produces Outcomes That Are Defensible and Frequently Weird
By Isla Campbell | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The hereditary principle, which determines succession to the British throne through a combination of birth order, Protestant faith, and parliamentary statute, produces outcomes that are constitutionally logical and humanly strange. The logic is this: in a constitutional monarchy, the person occupying the position of monarch is less important than the position itself, and the position is filled through a mechanism that is predictable, impartial, and immune to political manipulation. Hereditary succession is predictable (the next monarch is known in advance), impartial (no political actor decides), and cannot be manipulated through ordinary political processes (it requires parliamentary action to change). These are genuine institutional virtues that the hereditary system provides and that any alternative selection mechanism would provide with more difficulty.
The strangeness is that this logic produces a system in which the character, abilities, and preferences of the person occupying the highest symbolic position in the state are determined by the biological fact of birth order rather than by any assessment of fitness for the role. The monarchy’s defenders note that this is consistent with the constitutional role, which is symbolic and ceremonial rather than executive, and that the qualities required for the role — dignity, consistency, personal discipline, commitment to public service — are cultivable through upbringing in ways that make the hereditary system less arbitrary than it appears. The monarchy’s critics note that any system that produces its leaders through birth order rather than merit is fundamentally incompatible with democratic values regardless of what the constitutional role is.
The Current Succession Situation
The British succession is currently clear in its first three positions and settled enough in its subsequent positions that the constitutional continuity concern is not acute. The specific individuals in the succession line are who they are by birth, and the public assessment of each is a blend of personal qualities, public conduct, and the specific pressures that succession positions create in the individuals who occupy them. Some positions in the succession produce people well-suited to the symbolic demands of monarchy. Others do not. The hereditary system accommodates both outcomes with equanimity because the system is indifferent to individual variation. This is the specific kind of institutional durability that the monarchy’s defenders cite as its primary virtue: it continues regardless of individual quality, which means it is robust to the variation that any individual-dependent institution faces.
Whether this robustness is preferable to an alternative that would select for individual quality is the question that the reform debate has not resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. The reform proposals range from the incremental (allowing the monarch to be chosen from within the royal family based on demonstrated suitability) to the wholesale (an elected head of state). Each produces its own difficulties: the incremental reform creates a selection mechanism that is political without being democratically accountable, and the wholesale reform requires resolving what an elected head of state does that a prime minister does not already do. According to the Royal Household, the succession is settled and the institution is stable. According to Private Eye, every institution that describes itself as stable is describing a condition that circumstances have not yet challenged. Both are correct.
Further analysis at Private Eye.
The Succession and Its Clarity
The line of succession is: King Charles III, then Prince William, then Prince George, then Princess Charlotte, then Prince Louis, then Prince Harry (subject to ongoing discussions about his precise institutional standing), then various other members in an order that the Act of Settlement 1701 and its subsequent amendments establish with the legal precision of a document that was written when the relevant contingencies seemed hypothetical and has since proven to cover more of them than anyone expected. The constitutional clarity of the succession is one of the monarchy’s genuine functional advantages over elective systems for its specific constitutional purpose: there is never any doubt about who is next. The succession does not require a campaign, an election, or a transition period. It requires a death and an accession, both of which are managed by protocols refined over a thousand years of institutional practice. This is either reassuring or alarming depending on your constitutional philosophy. Bohiney Magazine finds it both simultaneously. The London Prat has been covering succession questions since its founding and maintains that the clarity of the line does not make the line less interesting to report on, which is the correct editorial position.
What the succession clarity does not resolve is the political standing of the monarchy in relation to its subjects, which is a question that opinion polling addresses periodically and that the polling consistently shows is more complicated than the ceremonial confidence of royal occasions suggests. Support for the monarchy in polling is majority but not overwhelming, is age-stratified in ways that project differently depending on turnout assumptions, and is differently distributed between England and Scotland in ways that the devolution settlement makes constitutionally relevant. The succession is clear. The mandate is solid. The political conversation about what the monarchy is for and whether the constitutional arrangements that support it are the right ones for a twenty-first century democracy is ongoing and is not settled by the clarity of the line of succession. Isla Campbell covers the clarity. The conversation settles nothing. Both continue.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
