AHC: True Elective Monarchy

Your challenge is to bring about an elective monarchy in any major nation in the world that doesn't descend into a hereditary monarchy in all but name, and is elected either directly or indirectly through a parliament or similar. They must be more than a figurehead or constitutional monarch and take some active role in executive affairs.

Cookies on offer if:

  • It (at least eventually) is directly elected by universal suffrage.
  • Survives to the 20th century (extra cookies if to the present day.)
  • Effective term limits as opposed to for life or until impeached.
  • Its in Britain
 
One could consider the Pope to be a non hereditary elective monarchy :D

Mess about with the papal states and turn the cardinals into MP equivalents and you could have it ;)
 
One could consider the Pope to be a non hereditary elective monarchy :D

Mess about with the papal states and turn the cardinals into MP equivalents and you could have it ;)

I suppose you have me on that one. :rolleyes:
Not really what I had in my mind. Is there anyway that doesn't involve the Pope but involves an absolute monarchy evolving into a democratic one? Maybe an earlier form of the republic that involves replacing Kings with better ones?
 
I suppose you have me on that one. :rolleyes:
Not really what I had in my mind. Is there anyway that doesn't involve the Pope but involves an absolute monarchy evolving into a democratic one? Maybe an earlier form of the republic that involves replacing Kings with better ones?

No worries.

The problem is that elective monarchies tend to be unstable which is why all previously elected monarchies became hereditary. See this good wikipedia article for a fuller explanation and examples.

However, the HRE might be a good place to start. Have most of the early Emperors die without heirs and increase the power of the Electors and you will start down the road to it being tradition for the post to be non-hereditary. Maintaining their power against their hereditary underlings however would be difficult.
 
Hamilton supposedly wanted the president to essentially be an elected monarch. I suppose if he had been taken more seriously, the United States would have been an elective monarchy. However, the monarch would not have absolute power, and would still, I hope, be called the President and wouldn't have people hanged for criticizing him.
 
Well if you find a way to keep Poland-Lithuania from being gobbled up, and institue some more constituional reforms in the 1790s and early 1800s (not impossible) you could have it (which was an elective monarchy) survive until the modern day.
 
Poland-Lithuania meets the challenge without the cookies.

The HRE could be argued to meet them as well. It's true that all but one emperor after 1440 was a Habsburg, but the election was not a formality. Charles Albert of Bavaria broke the Habsburg line, Louis XIV and Augustus the Strong wanted to and the Cologne and 30 Years' Wars were thought over the prospect of a Protestant being elected HRE.
 
So if the HRE survived, is it plausible that over time you could have seen the Reichstag or equivalent become a popularly elected body and gain the power of electing the Emperor, or even establish a constitutional convention whereby, in the same way that monarchs only appoint Prime Ministers that have the backing of Parliament, Electors only cast their votes for candidates that their territories support?
 
So if the HRE survived, is it plausible that over time you could have seen the Reichstag or equivalent become a popularly elected body and gain the power of electing the Emperor, or even establish a constitutional convention whereby, in the same way that monarchs only appoint Prime Ministers that have the backing of Parliament, Electors only cast their votes for candidates that their territories support?

Unlikely. The HRE was a sort of miniature UN; your idea would require a radical transformation in how it worked and the consent of a bewildering number of governments.
 
Unlikely. The HRE was a sort of miniature UN; your idea would require a radical transformation in how it worked and the consent of a bewildering number of governments.

The only possible way I can think of to address the second part of this is a level of centralization that probably requires ending the elective part of the monarchy and certainly requires the monarch in power to be able to impose his will on the situation - which will mean that by the point anyone would have the idea of Electors as basically a cross between the House of Lords and the Senate things its still impossible.

As a general thing, I'm not sure what kind of monarchy you'd have that would have effective term limits. That would be weird to the point of incomprehensible from any culture of OTL, though I suppose one could write a fictional society for it.
 
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