In other words, nothing.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
Meanwhile, currently, slavery is far more common in non-monarchies than monarchies.
Your “relatively common” is literally zero in the current reality, unless there’s countries you’re aware of that the rest of us aren’t.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
The end result is higher variance over a long period of time as a dictatorship switches between good and bad leadership. Meanwhile democracies consistently fail to execute on large scale visions. There's a reason corporate structure generally resembles a dictatorship, and that same reason is what eventually leads many of them to fail.
Tell that to guest workers in Saudi Arabia. Or to people in North Korea.
> There are plenty of monarchies in the world.
There are very few _real_ monarchies where the monarch has absolute power, with hereditary power transfer: Saudi Arabia, Oman, North Korea.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
> Serfdom was
Huh.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
It's a term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_monarchy
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
Admittedly it's possible that might run afoul of a dictionary definition or three. I'm not sure. I suppose it's all largely pointless speculation anyway since someone with a long enough term is going to be incentivized to modify the system to officially become hereditary if it isn't already.
> Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
Officially though?
Contrast with your other example, North Korea, where many of the abuses are indeed officially recognized.
There's plenty that the laws (or at least enforcement) in the western world fail to stop. In many cases you can argue that it's intentional (and I might even agree with you). But that doesn't make it official in that it isn't what's written down or what the electorate explicitly agreed to.
The thing is, regular autocracy has to destroy the institutions of power transfer. If there's a presumptive successor, then the autocrat can never feel secure in their power. So hereditary transfer is the only model that is at least tolerable for autocrats.
But building the institutions of power transfer requires people who are invested in them. So you need feudal lords who derive their power and wealth from their relation with the monarch. These feudal lords _themselves_ are interested in power transfer to make sure their heirs can be secure.
That's why, historically, elected kings turned into hereditary kings with only one exception, Vatican (for obvious reasons).
> Officially though?
Yes, they have laws that make it hard to pursue labor violations in court and the penalties are basically nothing ( https://www.migrant-rights.org/2024/02/saudi-arabia-reduces-... ).
Mikhail Mishustin. The Prime Minister of Russia takes over in the event of the President being indisposed and acts as temporary President until the President recovers or a new one is elected.
He is preventing anyone else from gaining similar levels of influence. For example, Mishustin's power was cut down by the changes Putin pushed into the Constitution in 2020.
Side note, this situation is 100% typical for autocracies. And once the autocrat dies, the country very often descends into chaos, simply because there are no institutions that are capable of resolving conflicts between groups without violence. Example: Libya.
I’m in Australia and the Trump presidency will be the thing for the next century that we can point to and say that this is why we are not going to ever, ever, ever get rid of the king or queen, in favour of a local president. I suspect that Canada and other countries feel much the same.
The best monarchs were the ones deposed by the revolutionaries, or the ones who abdicated the real power. There are 2 problems:
1. _Nobody_ should be ruling for more than 8-10 years.
2. You can't have a real monarchy without feudalism. And feudalism _always_ sucks.
Missed that part in your parent reply originally, you're right of course, cheers :)
That apart, the "show" function is important, too. It separates the Head of State and Head of Government functions, which makes it easier to dismiss the Head of Government, without disturbing the stability of the State. The US system fuses the two, which (in my view) is part of what makes the Congress reluctant to follow through on impeachment. (To avoid recent examples: had Bill Clinton been (treated like) a British Prime Minister in 1998 he'd have lost a no-confidence vote among his own party, and Al Gore would have served out his term. I think that would have been a better outcome than what actually happened, and followed.)
Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record. The problem isn't that you can't get good results, but rather the extreme variance.