zlacker

Are Republican systems immune from the head of state messing with legislation, or abusing executive privilege to keep things secret, inappropriately? The President of the US pushing for legislation--openly or otherwise, and including legislation that directly affects him--has been a feature of the American system basically from the start. And there are many examples of information being kept secret in the name of national security or whatever.

Between the two...could you really picture Queen Elizabeth attempting to seize total control of the state--much less accomplishing it? Or the monarchs of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, or Japan?

I can picture a President attempting to seize power in a Republican system. In fact I can point to several specific examples from the past few decades, successful or otherwise.

I'm definitely not saying constitutional monarchy is the perfect system, at all. I'm just saying that after spending most of my life with the assumption that monarchies were just a quaint anachronism left over from days gone by, a sort of political appendix...I've started to notice that they seem to have interesting properties and robustness that other systems might lack. It's possible that the monarchy serves a useful purpose after all (actually...much like the appendix).