Why do the monarchies have so high quality of life?

[buritobr]

The monarchies have higher HDI than the world average. United Kingdom, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Arab countries have high quality of life (exception: immigrants in Arab countries don't have high quality of life).

Why do the monarchies have high quality of life?

Maybe, it is the natural selection. If the people living in a monarchy don't have high quality of life, they will cut the king's/queen's head.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

By and large, those places where monarch remain, the society follows the rule of law to at least some degree. Monarchies such as Equatorial Guinea, Syria, and North Korea where the monarchs maintain a pretense of democratic selection are not exactly known for their quality of life.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Somehow I'd rather live in the US or France than in Saudi Arabia or Brunei, but that's just me.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I wouldn't say natural selrxtion, but societies with high amounts of inequality are perhaps less favourable to such an institution.

Also most monarchies were ditched in times of turbulence (colonisation, decolonisation, fascism, war, upheaval) so the remaining ones largely have been more peaceful.

[Santander]

Because of divine right.

[Cory]

The monarchies have higher HDI than the world average. United Kingdom, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Arab countries have high quality of life (exception: immigrants in Arab countries don't have high quality of life).

Why do the monarchies have high quality of life?

To be fair, calling the countries in bold "Monarchies" per se is a tad disingenuous. They are Monarchies in name only, in practice they are liberal democracies.

[DavidB.]

Category "correlation, no causation". Many monarchies happen to be in Western Europe (which is free/rich, but so are the republics in this area) and the Arab countries (which are rich because of oil).

[Indy Texas]

Are we forgetting about Thailand and Cambodia, which are relatively poor monarchies?

[Wells]

Is this a roundabout way of arguing that the US should become a monarchy?

[Storebought]

Some stray thoughts about the matter:

I made a post about the Empire of Brazil some time ago. It was easily the most conservative government ever established in the post-colonial New World. Whether the people of Brazil had a higher quality of life during the Empire than the Coffee Republics that came afterwards is debatable -- on the one hand, the monarchy was stabilizing and prestigious to Brazil, on the other hand, it was the very last Christian nation to abolish slavery.

Would Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been better off had they retained their monarchies like Morocco and Jordan? For Egypt, I say "yes", but for the others I think "not really."

Is Swaziland (the only absolute monarchy left in Africa) really that much better off than Lesotho? By HDI and GDP per capita, actually, yes, it is.

By the opposite argument, would Germany have an even higher quality of life if it retained the Hohenzollern dynasty past WWII? God no.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I made a post about the Empire of Brazil some time ago. It was easily the most conservative government ever established in the post-colonial New World. Whether the people of Brazil had a higher quality of life during the Empire than the Coffee Republics that came afterwards is debatable -- on the one hand, the monarchy was stabilizing and prestigious to Brazil, on the other hand, it was the very last Christian nation to abolish slavery.

My understanding of Brazilian history is that being a republic might have meant abolishing slavery even later. I could be wrong.

Agreed with the rest of your post.

[Storebought]

I made a post about the Empire of Brazil some time ago. It was easily the most conservative government ever established in the post-colonial New World. Whether the people of Brazil had a higher quality of life during the Empire than the Coffee Republics that came afterwards is debatable -- on the one hand, the monarchy was stabilizing and prestigious to Brazil, on the other hand, it was the very last Christian nation to abolish slavery.

My understanding of Brazilian history is that being a republic might have meant abolishing slavery even later. I could be wrong.

Agreed with the rest of your post.

I still have qualms about that.

The other Latin American republics abolished slavery nearly as soon as they gained their independence. They also tended to enact (if not quite enforce) more progressive legislation in general than the empire did.

Aside from that, was life for a common citizen (not a slave) in the empire of Brazil better than that in the contemporary Latin American republics? Hard statistics from that era are difficult to find, but I think it was higher. The fact that Brazil wasn't occupied and bombarded repeatedly like Mexico or Venezuela** has to count for something.

**Then again, they could have been repeatedly attacked because they were republics, an alien and hostile form of government to Britain and France in the 19th century.

[buritobr]

The Empire of Brazil was not a good country.

The monarchy ended in 1889. The slavery was abolished in 1888. The supporters of the monarchy say that the royal family had anti-slavery views. The family didn't own slaves. However, even if we accept that the emperor Pedro II was abolitionist, he was incompetent to abolish the slavery. Her daughter, Princess Isabel, was an abolitionist. However, as I said before, slavery was abolished only 1.5 year before the Proclamation of the Republic.
The income per capita gap between Europe and Brazil was bigger in that time than it is now.
The illiteracy rate among the adult population was >70%. Even the neighboor Argentina was already starting mass education policies.
Mexico and Peru had universities since the 17th century. The first Brazilian university was founded in 1920, already during the Republic.

[Indy Texas]

The Empire of Brazil was not a good country.

The monarchy ended in 1889. The slavery was abolished in 1888. The supporters of the monarchy say that the royal family had anti-slavery views. The family didn't own slaves. However, even if we accept that the emperor Pedro II was abolitionist, he was incompetent to abolish the slavery. Her daughter, Princess Isabel, was an abolitionist. However, as I said before, slavery was abolished only 1.5 year before the Proclamation of the Republic.
The income per capita gap between Europe and Brazil was bigger in that time than it is now.
The illiteracy rate among the adult population was >70%. Even the neighboor Argentina was already starting mass education policies.
Mexico and Peru had universities since the 17th century. The first Brazilian university was founded in 1920, already during the Republic.

It's worth remembering that Spain and Portugal were both also badly-run monarchies and were the poorest, least educated, least industrialized countries in Europe. Their biggest leaps of progress occurred in periods when the monarchy was explicitly or implicitly absent (the mid-20th century).

[Antonio the Sixth]

To paraphrase,

Nobody even remotely serious about studying comparative politics would claim that there is a causal link between a monarchical form of government and higher standards of living, and there are a lot of ridiculous serious claims floating around in comparative politics.

[angus]

When I first read your post I could tell you were "cherrypicking" perhaps to make a normative proposition, but upon further consideration I think you may be on to something.

Here is a list of monarchies of the world with 2015 human development indices:

Bahrain      0.824
Belgium      0.890
Bhutan      0.605
Brunei      0.856
Cambodia      0.555
Denmark      0.923
Japan      0.891
Jordan      0.748
Kuwait      0.816
Lesotho      0.497
Liechtenstein      0.908
Luxembourg      0.892
Malaysia      0.779
Monaco        n/a
Morocco      0.628
Netherlands      0.922
Norway      0.944
Oman      0.793
Qatar      0.850
Samoa      0.702
Saudi Arabia      0.837
Spain      0.876
Swaziland      0.531
Sweden      0.907
Thailand      0.726
Tonga      0.717
United Kingdom      0.907

All except two are constitutional monarchies, using the UN definition.  No HDI value is listed for Monaco.

The average HDI of monarchies is 0.799

The average HDI for all 188 countries listed in the 2015 UNHDI report is 0.692

This is a simple average.  For a more thorough analysis you should probably take an average weighted by population.  From these data I think we can say that monarchies have a significantly higher HDI than countries do in general.  To figure out why I think you'd have to look at all the data.  You can download a fifteen-table MS Excel file from the UNHDI website--that's where I tabulated these.  You'd have to pour over quite a large amount of statistics, but probably your answer lies therein. 

[Ban my account ffs!]

yeah everyone looks at this backwards.

These nations still maintain the vestiges of monarchy because they have been peaceful and prosperous.

High HDI and pre-existing monarchy probably means a high likelihood that the monarchy will remain with some limited powers.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm about to start TAing for UCLA's undergrad intro to comparative politics class, and this is one of the links the prof shared on the course website. I think it's highly relevant to this thread.

The sad thing, of course, is that said students have an age range of roughly 17-19.