Stories of Democracy and Monarchies

As a political scientist I don’t really find any form of government necessarily boring. In fact I’m probably a bit unconventional in my approach to the viability of various forms of government. But as I began working on my creative writing hobby, I realized a few things that are retrospectively simply obvious.

First, most fiction stories of note take place in worlds with non-democratic governments.

Second, democracy is boring.

The second point reinforces the first. That is, the boringness of democratic governance leads to the writers of fiction stories to instead pursue more interesting governmental systems, thus using a government that isn’t a democracy, or at the very least only vaguely resembles a democracy.

Democracy is driven by the most boring endeavor in the history of mankind – bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the system by which operations are set to happen. In the abstract, everyone hates it and tends to say they can’t understand it. But it’s a simple concept. It is simply the rules about which systems operate. The fact is bureaucracy is ever-present in our lives because that is just the logical way to carry out organization for the completion of tasks. The DMV gets a bad reputation, and it’s blamed on the bureaucracy, but the reality is that there is little else option. Society dictates that anyone who wants a driver’s license must be of a certain age, pass a certain set of tests, and their identity must be verified. The DMV is the bureaucracy through which that takes place. It’s painfully boring and tedious to most, but it is a system that is required to exist.

That is what democracy is, in so far as the system of governance. It is in part why it works – there are rules and processes that must be followed, and breaking those rules and processes takes substantial effort. It is complex, multi-leveled, with reasonable fail-safes to help preserve sustainability of the nation in question.

This is all well and good for reality. In real life this is necessary. Real life is supposed to be boring when dealing with stuff like government. The fact that it is not is a problem in of itself.

That is what makes properly functional democracy a poor fit for exciting storytelling. Think for a moment of any story you’ve read, or watched on TV or at the theater. Most of the time it either involves some form of monarchy, or if there is a democracy it is absurdly corrupt or otherwise faulty. This is all for the excitement of the story.

It is also all for simplicity. Democracy is often mistakenly conceived as a top-down pyramid in a traditional sense. Casually ask most people how the government is organized, they will tell you it’s the president/prime minister at the top, the Congress/diet/parliament, and then the courts. This is obviously a wrong-headed understanding of government, and leads to a problem I believe in the interaction with government most people envision. The fact is those three branches are equals in their role. The courts, if they pursue unanimity in purpose, can enforce what laws they deem suitable and those they do not, by the very reality that it is incumbent on them to determine matters of legality. There is only so much that can be done if the courts, for instance, decide they will no longer proceed on cases of drug use.

Similarly, the legislature writes the laws and passes them. If Congress passes a law that says you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, that becomes the law and so long as it is enforced no one can walk and chew gum at the same time. The executive sets up the mechanisms for implementing the laws. They create the bodies to oversee enforcement. If they don’t do this, then it doesn’t matter how many laws Congress writes, because there is no mechanism for arrests and incarceration.

Democracy is exceptionally complex and nuanced, particularly if you want to get into the fineries of competition over power between the executive, judicial and legislative branches, the roles of specific power holders in each branch, and the interplay of terms of office – the judiciary being life-terms, the presidency (at least in the US) being 10 years maximum, and the legislature being indefinite terms at two or six years each.

And that doesn’t even cover the elements of federalism with the different levels of government, or matters of succession in the event of an individual’s death.

That complexity leads to possibility. There is room to craft a truly interesting interplay with government. But the issue is that it would more or less dominate the story. There is so much complexity that explaining it all would become a necessity.

That is where the storytelling power of monarchies come in. At a functional level there exists comparable structures; a parliamentary style body that serves more as advisors, a judiciary that simply meters out judgments that align with the laws of the kingdom.

There may be in a monarchy multiple levels of government, but these are purely subservient to the monarch, less of the lab of experimentation that is municipal government in most democracies. Succession in any one position save the monarch themselves is simply a matter of appointment. The biggest question of contention is the succession of the monarch, which is what most such stories focus on – that battle of the reigning monarch to hold on to power and the challenge from those who seek to dethrone them.

That makes monarchies simpler to write about. For all the intricacy that can be placed into a story centered around a monarchy, it can structurally be understood much more simplistically without as many leaps in cognition. There isn’t the wonder about why some part of the government isn’t doing something it should, or complex explanations about why some otherwise obscure politician has any role of importance in the story. In part because democracy is a system that is based on set rules, there is ease in outsiders entering the story, but difficulty in assigning substantial influence. Conversely, there are significant barriers to entry in an autocratic system, but there is relative ease in assigning influence once overcoming those barriers.

Furthermore, there are acts that are more acceptable for a monarch that would not be for a president or complimentary person. While wealth for a democratic leader is viewed as an aberration, a flaw within the system, the wealth of a monarch is expected. Their opulence becomes a critical factor of the story, and again is where the excitement of a democratic story comes in, though representing more a sign of the corruptness of a floundering system, as opposed to the relative positive symbolism often represented in non-democratic stories.

Finally, monarchies provide clear conflicts. War is expected in a monarchy because of the idea that there are always many fighting to have a voice in the system. In democracy the idea is that as everyone has an opportunity to speak and be heard, internal conflict has no place with reasonable people involved. Again, it serves as a sign of something perversely corrupt if war breaks out internally in a democratic nation. Counter that with the limits of hegemony that democracy entails. A democratic nation has to fear overreaches as these make them seem less than democratic, both externally and internally. Reaches for power and influence must be measured and to some degree stealthy. Monarchies are not invested, in general, in such masking of intent. A monarchy seeking to expand its influence will do so, answering only to those who have the means of getting in their way; great for storytelling, not so much for reality.

The simplicity of creating and sustaining a monarchy in storytelling is easy. No excuse or explanation is needed for their wealth or how it is received, no one outside their family is needed to be mentioned, except as it pertains to the broader story and driving conflict. With a democracy the wealth of the president becomes central to the framing of the story in so far as how corrupt it is planned to be, and at least a vice president and leader of the parliamentary body is required, as well as sustained references to an ever-present election date.

It’s not that it can’t be done, but most fiction stories look to tell a story different from the one relayed through politics. It’s more interesting from a storytelling perspective to tell a tale of a fighter on the battlefield dethroning a corrupt or evil king than of running a political campaign and trying to win votes. It can be done, but it’s just not as interesting. So when you read a bunch of fiction stories and wonder why they involve monarchies and not democracies, understand that this is why; democracy is effective, but boring.