Abstract
In view of the interest and emotion that the monarchy excites among social scientists as well as journalists, one might expect that the varied and sometimes contradictory hypotheses and speculations about the topic would have stimulated careful empirical examinations.1 Such is not the case. There have been few attempts to specify the dimensions of attitudes to the monarchy,2 or to test the relationships between these attitudes and other political orientations.3 In an area as little documented and as charged with emotion as the monarchy, social scientists should move warily — but some move deferentially, and others aggressively. With unintended irony Edward Shils and Michael Young comment, ‘Even the most eminent scholars lose their sureness of touch when they enter the presence of royalty’.4
Comparative Politics, July 1976.
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Notes
Cf. the discussion of the monarch’s rôle in the 1931 British crisis. R. Bassett, Nineteen Thirty-One; Political Crisis (London, 1958),
Appendix I, with problems arising in the Netherlands, see Jan Kooiman and J. Vis, ‘Parliament in a System in Flux: Netherlands’ (Luxembourg: European Parliament Symposium on European Integration, EP 35.656, May 1974, duplicated), p. 6 Austria,
see Kurt Steiner, Politics in Austria (Boston, 1972), pp. 111–13: and Finland,
see J. Nousiainen, The Finnish Political System (Cambridge, Mass, 1971), p. 240.
Except for the study analysed herein, the only full-length academic survey of attitudes toward the monarchy known to the authors is that by J. G. Blumler, J. R. Brown, A. J. Ewbank and T. J. Nossiter, ‘Attitudes to the Monarchy: their Structure and Development during a Ceremonial Occasion’. Political Studies. XIX, June 1971. The study is concerned with the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. Socialisation studies sometimes contain a question or two about attitudes toward the monarchy, but even where there is an attempt to explore these attitudes in detail there remain major objections to extrapolating adult attitudes from these findings. Cf. Fred Greenstein, V. M. Herman, R. N. Stradling and Elia Zurick, ‘The Child’s Conception of the Queen and the Prime Minister: Bagehot Revisited’; British Journal of Political Science, IV, July 1974, pp. 260ff; and David Marsh, ‘Political Socialization: the Implicit Assumptions Questioned’, British Journal of Political Science, I, Oct. 1971.
But for a caution against the misuse of survey data to describe properties of institutions and systems, see Erwin Scheuch, ‘Cross-National Comparisons Using Aggregate Data’, in Richard L. Merritt and Stein Rokkan, (eds.), Comparing Nations (New Haven, Conn., 1966).
Edward Shils and Michael Young, ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, Sociological Review, I, 2, 1953; cf. Norman Birnbaum, ‘Monarchs and Sociologists: a Reply to Professor Shils and Mr Young’. Sociological Review III, 1, 1953, p. 13;
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 101–2;
And for an orthodox Communist view, James Harvey and Katherine Hood, The British State (London, 1958), p. 5–67.
For a minor exception, see David Butler and Donald Stokes. Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed. (London, 1974) pp. 190ff.
See Eric Nordlinger, The Working-Class Tories (London, 1967), p. 242;
And R. T. McKenzie and Allan Silver, Angels in Marble (London, 1968).
The number of respondents remains one-third greater than that in the Leeds survey of Blumler et al., op. cit., and the response rate is higher than that in the British section of The Civic Culture survey, 59 per cent. See Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture (Princeton, 1963), p. 518.
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London: World’s Classics edition, reprinted in 1955).
See Richard Rose, Politics in England Today (London, 1974), p. 147; And Mark Abrams, ‘Social Trends and Electoral Behaviour’. British Journal of Sociology, XIII, 3, 1962, Table 7.
Gallup Political Index, Report no. 98 (London, 1968), p. 67.
A nation-wide survey in October 1969 by National Opinion Polls reported that 84 per cent said that Britain needs a Queen, and 16 per cent said it did not. This indicates that, if anything, the extent of pro-monarchical attitudes is slightly underestimated by the Glasgow survey rather that overestimated. Cf. NOP, Political Bulletin, supplement II (London: Oct. 1969), p. 2.
Lord Altrincham et al., Is the Monarchy Perfect? (London, 1958).
See Richard Rose, ‘England: a Traditionally Modern Culture’, in Lucien Pye and Sidney Verba (eds.), Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton, 1963);
and, for a community study, Margaret Stacy, Tradition and Change: a Study of Banbury (London, 1960).
Frank Parkin, ‘Working-class Conservatives’, British Journal of Sociology, XVIII, 3, 1967, p. 280.
On AID generally, see J. A. Sonquist and J. N. Morgan, The Detection of Inter-Action Effects (Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, Monograph no. 35, 1965).
S. M. Lipset, Political Man (New York, 1960), p. 79.
Kingsley Martin, The Crown and the Establishment (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 18–72.
See e.g., Sir James Fergusson, The Curragh Incident (London, 1964);
Richard Rose, Governing without Consensus (London, 1971), especially Ch. 5.
See Walter Bagehot, op. cit., Ch. 2, and W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London, 1963).
Harry Eckstein, Division and Cohesion in Democracy: a Study of Norway (Princeton, 1966).
See e.g., George Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency (New York, 1970).
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York, 1961).
Dermot Morrah, Arundel Herald Extraordinary, The Work of The Queen (London, 1958), Ch. 2.
Cf. Dermot Morrah, op. cit., p. 45; Richard Crossman, Inside View (London, 1972), p. 53;
And Fred Greenstein, ‘What the President Means to Americans’, in James David Barber (ed.), Choosing the President (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974).
For a general discussion of the rôle and risks of monarchy in non-Western nations, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn., 1969) pp. 177 ff.
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© 1990 Dennis Kavanagh and Richard Rose
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Kavanagh, D. (1990). The Monarchy in Contemporary Political Culture. In: Politics and Personalities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20961-3_16
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