Monarchy

Monarchy is a form of government in which a single person, the monarch, holds supreme or ceremonial authority over a state, typically for life and typically transmitted through hereditary succession within a ruling family, a form of political organization documented across nearly every world region and among the oldest recorded forms of centralized political authority. Monarchies vary widely in the actual scope of the monarch's power: an absolute monarchy vests essentially unconstrained governing authority in the monarch, historically exemplified by early modern states such as France under Louis XIV, while a constitutional monarchy limits the monarch's power under a constitution or body of law, typically to largely ceremonial and symbolic functions, with actual governing authority held by an elected parliament and government, a form adopted across most surviving European monarchies since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Succession to a monarchy has historically followed various rules, including primogeniture favoring the eldest child, election among eligible candidates as in some elective monarchies, or rotation among designated royal houses, and monarchy has coexisted historically with, and given rise to, many more specific institutional forms, including sacred kingship, dual kingship, and various hereditary noble hierarchies subordinate to the crown. As of the early twenty-first century a substantial minority of the world's sovereign states, concentrated particularly in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Oceania, retain a reigning monarch, the great majority as constitutional rather than absolute monarchies.