Representative Government Is Harder to Topple Than a King, and That Is Not Only Good News

Monarchies fell often. Read any dynastic history and it is a list of depositions, assassinations, usurpations, and palace coups, with the occasional peaceful succession as a relief. Representative governments, by contrast, almost never fall. Administrations change, but the system persists, sometimes through wars, depressions, and scandals that would have ended a dozen kings.

This is usually counted as an unqualified virtue. I want to explain why the stability exists and then ask what it costs, because the two are the same fact seen from different sides.

Why a King Was Easy to Remove

A monarchy has a single point of failure, and everyone knows where it is.

The legitimacy of the regime lives in one person. Kill him, imprison him, or persuade the army to stop obeying him, and there is nothing left to defend; the institution is the man. Every ambitious noble, every general, every rival branch of the family knew exactly what needed to happen and exactly whom it needed to happen to. The plans wrote themselves.

There was also no release valve. Discontent could not be expressed in a way that changed anything short of removing the king, so it accumulated until removal was the only option. A monarchy is a pressure vessel with no safety valve and a single weld.

Why a Representative Government Is Not

Representative government has none of these properties, and each absence is a source of stability.

Legitimacy is diffuse. It does not live in a person but in a procedure. Remove the head of government and the procedure produces another one, with no interruption to the claim that the system is legitimate. There is no neck to cut.

There is a regular release valve. Every few years the population is invited to throw out the people at the top, and it frequently does. Discontent that would have built toward revolt is discharged through the ballot. Crucially, the discharge changes the people while leaving the system untouched; the pressure goes out and the vessel is unharmed.

Responsibility is spread. When something goes wrong, there is a legislature, an executive, a court, a previous administration, and a bureaucracy to share the blame. The public's anger cannot find a single target, and anger without a target dissipates.

Everyone has a stake. Enough people benefit, or believe they might, from the continuation of the system that a coalition to overthrow it cannot form. A monarchy could be overthrown by a small faction; a representative system would require a majority to want it gone, and majorities are the one thing the system is good at fragmenting.

The result is a regime that absorbs shocks a monarchy could not survive. That is real, and it is the honest case for the system.

What the Stability Costs

Now turn it around. Every one of those properties is a reason the system persists. Not one of them is a reason the system is good. They would stabilise a bad regime exactly as well as a good one, and that is what should worry us.

The release valve discharges pressure by changing the people, not the structure. Which means that structural problems, the ones that survive every change of personnel, never generate enough pressure to be addressed. The public is offered the satisfaction of removing a government and is thereby prevented from removing the thing the government was a symptom of. I have argued that institutions almost never die; this is the mechanism at the top of the pyramid.

The diffusion of legitimacy means there is no one to hold to account for the system itself. A king could be blamed for the kingdom. Nobody can be blamed for representative democracy. It has no author, no address, and no neck.

And the fact that everyone has a stake means that everyone has a reason not to look too closely. A monarchy could be criticised freely by everyone who was not the king. A system that has recruited the entire population as minor shareholders has recruited them as minor defenders.

The Conclusion I Draw

A regime that cannot be toppled is a regime that cannot be replaced, and a regime that cannot be replaced will not improve unless it chooses to, which regimes do not do.

The old systems were unstable because they were fragile, and their fragility was the population's only lever. We have built something that is not fragile. That protects us from the coups and the palace wars, and it is a genuine advance. It also means that if the system has a deep flaw, and I think it has several, the flaw is now protected by the same properties that protect us. We have made government safe from its enemies. We have also made it safe from its customers.

The question that follows is not how to make representative government unstable again. It is how to build a system that is stable against violence and still exposed to correction. That is a different design problem from the one the last three centuries solved, and I do not think we have started on it.