Elective Monarchy / Real Life

• As a general rule, most monarchies were a combination of Elective and Hereditary whenever nobles had any usable degree of power; in a legally elective monarchy, the family of the previous King was often influential, and stood to gain prestige and favors (and thus votes). In a legally hereditary monarchy, rightful successors were known to be passed over for a more effective or popular family member, as an inability to control their vassals would result in the dynasty losing control of the monarchy. The end result of this was that certain nobles would make their wishes for the succession known directly to the king, who often had to balance the legal succession laws with the reality of the situation for the sake of a stable realm. While not legally elective monarchies, they had similar effects and political dynamics.
  • A peculiar attitude towards this is the British monarchy, where said nobles—plus some rich commoners—had formed themselves into a Witan in the Anglo-Saxon era, and via a series of consitutional contortions that involved Magna Carta, into Parliament. While the convention was that the eldest son of the monarch took the throne, the Witans and Parliaments had repeated disputes with the monarchs about who got to "settle the succession": that is, determine the law of who got to be King. After a big war, Parliament came out on top; to this day, the British succession is governed solely by statutory law passed by Parliament, and the will of the monarch is more or less only given weight as a practical consideration.^note "More or less", because—this being Britain—it's not quite that simple. The monarch is at least nominally kind-of-sort-of part of Parliament inasmuch as the monarch must approve bills and formally retains the right not to do so. Therefore, at least in theory, a monarch could withhold Royal Assent for any bill altering the succession, and constitutionally this would be acceptable because the monarch would be acting in her/his capacity as the kind-of-sort-of third chamber of Parliament, and so "Parliament" would have rejected the change. That also being said, there are very strong conventions that monarchs will not use a "reserve power" like withholding Royal Assent to a bill that has passed the Lords and Commons, so (as happens so often) the force of tradition serves in place of formal legal barriers to keep the British system making sense. Thus although the British monarchy is hereditary, it is indirectly elective, because Parliament decided to set down a predetermined hereditary succession law rather than elect a new monarch each time the monarch died or elect a designated successor while the monarch lives (both of which Parliament is legally entitled to do). So in a way, Britain is an elective monarchy where the electing body has decided that doing the actual elections would be too much work (and that it was desirable to continue with the French-derived system of the heir instantly taking the throne upon the monarch's death, avoiding any interregnum period in which the throne is empty) and simply set down a law that "automatically" elects the monarch's heir by primogeniture as the new monarch. Under the United Kingdom's system of parliamentary supremacy, the exact mechanism for succession can be and has been changed at will by a new vote of Parliament, most recently with the Perth Agreement in 2013 to change from male-preference to absolute primogeniture and to remove the ban on those in line to the throne from marrying Catholics. (The Commonwealth adds the further wrinkle that at least some of the various Commonwealth Realms—the former colonies which retained constitutional monarchy on independence and remain in personal union with Britain—also have to approve the change, but on the two occasions it might have been a problem in 1936 and 2013, they did so with relatively little fuss.^note In 1936, the government of the Irish Free State made a point of symbolically dragging its feet, but only for a day (at this point Ireland was almost completely constitutionally independent of Britain anyway, and was slowly demolishing the remaining links). There was some fear that Quebec would try and leverage the 2013 change for policy concessions, but between some fancy constitutional footwork by Stephen Harper's Conservative federal government at the time and the subsequent defeat of the sovereigntist Quebec provincial government for unrelated reasons, the succession has stopped being a live political issue in Canada. The biggest delay in 2013 was because the Parliament of the State of Western Australia—whose seat, ironically, is just down the street from where the Commonwealth Realms had hashed out and signed the agreement formally proposing the change—simply forgot to put the succession issue on the agenda.). Despite all of this horse-trading and squabbling, the current Royal Family can still trace their ancestry directly back to Alfred the Great, which raises the question of how much of a difference it actually made (answer: in terms of who's on the throne, not much, in the long run. In terms of how much they can do with it, everything).
• The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, especially after the last of the Jagiellons died without issue in 1573. It's better known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. With a king. One may claim it was a republic with a lifelong presidential term (compare with Venice below), and for this reason the Polish state that was created in 1918 is known historically as the Second Polish Republic (and today's post-Communist Poland is called the Third Polish Republic).
• The Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation): The King of the Germans (who would usually but not always be crowned Emperor)^note Until the 16th century it was only popes who could make Holy Roman Emperors. was elected from the 12th century onward. However, while the electors were always some combination of secular rulers and prince-archbishops (i.e. bishops and archbishops who were also the secular rulers of some or all of their ecclesiastical province), which of the secular and clerical greats of the Empire would have the privilege was a frequent source of contention.
  • The original configuration of the electoral college is lost to history. The most likely configuration in the early period was that it was composed of some senior churchmen plus the secular rulers of the four "stem duchies" of Franconia, Saxony, Swabia, and Bavaria (the so-called "four tribes" of Germany). There's no direct documention of this, however, and a system based on the "stem duchies" can't have lasted long, as they were abolished in 1180 by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.
  • The first document laying out a list of imperial electors is a 1265 letter by Pope Urban IV. The Pope, commenting on the election of 1257, said that, following "immemorial custom", the college had been composed of seven princes of the Empire. Four were secular rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Count Palantine of the Rhine (who at the time was also the Duke of Bavaria) and the Duke of Saxony. The remaining three were the Archbishop-Electors of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier. This also maintained balance among the most major noble houses of the empire, as it gave only one electorate (the Palatinate) to the rising House of Wittelsbach while giving two (Brandenburg and Saxony) to the relatively neutral and pliant House of Ascania, and a fourth (Bohemia) to the Přemyslid dynasty, which didn't really consider itself a player in imperial politics. It also gave no electorates at all to the Houses of Hohenstaufen, Welf, and Habsburg (unless one of their junior members joined the clergy and became a prince-archbishop) which had been trading off being King of the Romans/Holy Roman Emperor for the previous century,^note Disregarding, er, the election of 1257, in which the candidates were Richard of Cornwall (the second son of King John of England and younger brother of Henry The Third) and King Alfonso X of Castile. Richard won 4 votes to 3, but not without a lot of accusations of graft and dishonesty, to say nothing of the fact that the Pope and the King of France (St. Louis IX, incidentally) backed Alfonso before being sweet-talked into dropping their objections to Richard by Eleanor of Provence (Henry III's wife/Richard's sister-in-law). The vote was acrimonious enough that Richard was never formally crowned Holy Roman Emperor, even though the Pope dropped his official opposition to his election. The English-Castilian contretemps over the election of 1257 incidentally led to the marriage of Henry III's son and heir Edward I "Longshanks" to Alfonso's sister Eleanor of Castile, which was one of the great Perfectly Arranged Marriages of the High Middle Ages. forcing them to rely more heavily on the lesser houses to win the crown.
  • By the reign of Emperor Charles IV, the composition of the electoral college had become a point of contention, largely because of the rising ambitions and problems of three houses: the Wittelsbachs, the Luxembourgs, and the Habsburgs. Charles, a Luxembourg, had snagged Bohemia himself and was scheming more broadly to enhance his territory. Meanwhile, the Wittelsbachs had split the County Palatine from Bavaria under separate branches, and still a third Wittelsbach line had taken over in Brandenburg. On top of that, the Dukes of Austria under the House of Habsburg were gaining prominence, having been elected King but not crowned Emperor twice between the election of 1257 and Charles IV's day.
    
    Each of these developments caused issues. The Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria complained that they should have gotten an elctorate on the grounds that Bavaria (a major part of the Empire) was now unrepresented in the college, when before it had been. They were also annoyed that Bohemia got to vote, even though Bohemia wasn't German. Also, neither of the last two members of the Brandenburg Wittelsbach line had any heirs, so there was a risk that another Wittelsbach line might get it. Meanwhile, Austria was campaigning to be added to the college for nakedly political reasons.
    
    Charles wasn't interested in having two or even three Wittelsbach electors if he could help it. He also saw Austria as a threat and kind of hated the Habsburgs' guts. Thus to silence the debate, he issued the Golden Bull of 1356, the first official, legal statement of who was an elector. The Bull legally confirmed the traditional configuration of Bohemia, Brandenburg, County Palatine, Saxony, Mainz, Cologne, and Trier. This would keep the Bavarian Wittelsbachs at the throats of their Palatinate cousins, while continuing to empower the Ascanias (whom Charles had in his pocket). A few years later, he was also successful in putting his own son on the throne of Brandenburg after forcing the last, childless Wittelsbach out. The Golden Bull would remain in effect for the rest of the Empire's existence—albeit not without modification.
  • After the Golden Bull but before the Reformation, the electors generally gave the imperial title to the Luxembourgs, Wittelsbachs, and Habsburgs in alternation. During this period, Bavaria still sometimes stepped in anyway for the Palatinate (when the Bavarian Wittlesbachs' scheming against their Palatinate cousins was particularly successful) or for Bohemia (when the rival Wittelsbach branches took a break from messing with each other and instead conspired with each other to exclude Bohemia on the grounds that he wasn't German). The House of Ascania also died out in the 15th century, and was replaced in Saxony by the similarly neutral and pliant House of Wettin. After the Reformation, the Palatinate Wittelsbachs were Protestants and the Bavarian ones Catholics, so early in the Thirty Years' War the (Catholic Habsburg) Emperor (who held his electorate as King of Bohemia) ganged up with the bishops to give the Wittelsbach electorate to the Bavarian branch. (The Emperor needed to rely on the bishops for this because at this point Saxony and Brandenburg were the leaders of the Protestant coalition within the Empire.) At the end of the war, the Peace of Westphalia gave a new, eighth electorate to the Protestant Palatinate Wittelsbachs in the interest of religious peace.
  • At the end of the 17th century a ninth electorate was added for the Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (who became known as the Elector of Hanover). The Palatinate had passed to a Catholic junior branch of the territory's Wittelsbach line, and a new Protestant elector was needed to restore the religious balance. The House of Hanover was a junior branch of the Welfs, which had largely stopped being relevant in the 12th century and was thus seen as a safe choice for that role. Later, in the 1770s, the Bavarian Wittelsbachs died out, which in the end led to the Catholic Counts Palatine ruling Bavaria, as well; however, it was agreed that he would only have one vote (not that it ended up mattering). The Electors of Hanover, incidentally, became The House of Hanover in Great Britain, meaning that the British monarch had a nominal hand in choosing the Emperor for about 100 years.
  • The Imperial title became de facto hereditary within the House of Habsburg towards the end of the 15th century, when the Luxembourgs petered out—leaving much of their territory (most significantly Bohemia and its juicy electorate) to a Habsburg who had married a Luxembourg princess. (Meanwhile, Brandenburg went to the previously insignificant and Wettinesquely pliant House of Hohenzollern—though they wouldn't be insignificant or pliant for very long.) With the Wittelsbach branches at each other's throats about religion, the Imperial throne went to the Habsburgs time and time again basically by default. After this pattern settled in, the Electors generally did not keep the "obvious" heir from the throne until the War of the Austrian Succession (although even before then the "obvious" heir would usually make a point of doing favors for the electors to keep them from holding up the vote when the time came).
    • The War of the Austrian Succession is an instructive example of how this worked in practice. The war came about because the male-line Habsburgs were dying out, and the last two agnatic Habsburgs, Joseph I and his brother Charles VI, had expended a lot of political capital getting the other electors to secure a Habsburg succession through their daughters should both of them die without male issue. The problem was that the deals they secured were contradictory: Joseph's deal put his daughters ahead of any Charles might have, but in 1713 Charles (by that point Emperor) flipped that and got the electors to agree. This should have secured the succession for his daughter, but when Charles VI died, the Duke of Bavaria successfully nobbled all the other electors^note This included Hanover; as the election happened two years into the war and Britain—in personal union with Hanover—was fighting on Austria's side, this seems to have come as a bit of a shock to the Austrians. The Duke of Bavaria's brother, the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, also voted for him, even though he had allied Cologne with Austria and favored the Habsburg succession. and they backed him on the grounds that Charles VI's deal was improper and preference should have been given to the claims of his wife—one of Joseph I's daughters. In the end, of course, Maria Theresa still managed to get the throne after the war was over. On paper, though, it was her husband, and later her son, who had the throne, though all knew she was the one actually doing the ruling.
  • Incidentally all German kings/emperors can be placed into a single family tree, not that it is a particularly readable or simple one, but still all of them from Charlemagne to Wilhelm II were more or less related to each other. This includes Napoleon, who married a Habsburg princess.
• The United Arab Emirates, in theory at any rate: although the President is supposedly elected by the rulers of the seven emirates of the UAE, it's always the Emir of Abu Dhabi who holds the position of President, and the President always appoints the Emir of Dubai Prime Minister (unless the Emir of Dubai doesn't want/can't take the job, in which case his heir apparent takes it).
• In Denmark, the kings were elected from at least the Viking age until 1660. With a single exception all kings (and one woman, Queen Margrethe I, titled "Principal Lady and Husband of the North") came from the same family though, even if some spring around in the family tree were needed now and then. But it kept on, so the current ruling King Frederik X can look back on a millennium-old family tree of Danish kings.
• In the same vein, Sweden elected its kings until the end of the 15th century, and all free men could vote. Of course, vote for the wrong candidate and you get your teeth kicked in, but hey, it's the thought that counts.
  • While every free man (or at least everyone belonging to the higher estates plus landowning farmers) technically could vote, the electorate usually consisted of the nobles, the bishops, their private armies, and assorted peasant revolts with a grudge.
  • Sweden did it again in 1809, when the unpopular king Gustav IV Adolf and his descendants were forcibly removed and the parliament elected his uncle as Charles XIII. It is a bit unclear whether they then realized the new king was 61 and childless or did so deliberately as an interim solution while they looked for an actual new king to elect crown prince, and elected a Danish prince, Charles August, as crown prince in 1810. Then Charles August died of a stroke later that year, and they had to elect a new crown prince, Marshall of the (French) Empire Jean Bernadotte^note Who ironically had been very anti-monarchist in his youth, and was rumored to have tattooed the radical republican slogan "death to all kings" on his chest., thus starting the current dynasty of Swedish kings.
• The medieval kings of Norway were likewise elected. The kings had to be recognized by the ruling body of nobles (Riksrådet) before being crowned. Before that, the commons, most often the farmers, had to recognize the kings at an open assembly. Historians are at odds on how this exactly worked when Denmark and Norway became a union, as Norwegians claim that they elected their kings, while Denmark was hereditary. The status for the union kings until 1660 was therefore: Crowned in Denmark and "elected" in Norway. Absolutism made an end to that mess.
  • To make things even more interesting: The founder of the modern royal family in Norway, Haakon VII/Prince Carl of Denmark, actually insisted on a referendum before taking position as king. Thus, he was actually originally elected by the Norwegian politicians. The referendum stated the support for monarchy, confirming to Prince Carl that the Norwegian people really did want him to become their new king.^note Though Danish by birth, he was also a direct descendant of 13th century Haakon V (the last king of an independent Norway until Haakon VII; all intervening Norwegian kings had also been king of either Denmark, Sweden or both), through both his father and his mother. Given the widespread intermarriage between European royal families, this is extremely common and thus few nations in Europe thought twice about inviting a "foreign" prince to be their king when the royal line dies out..
• The King of Vatican City, better known as the Roman Catholic Pope. Aside from being the head of the Catholic Church, he is the last absolute monarch in Europe and one of the last in the world. He is elected by a group of cardinals from among their number,^note Technically they can choose any practicing Catholic male as Pope (though a layman would have to be elevated to deacon, then priest, then consecrated as a Bishop before he could assume the ofice of Pope). In practice, but for rare exceptions, only cardinals have been elected for over a thousand years. hereditary monarchy being a rather difficult proposition for celibate Catholic clergy.^note Not that it stopped some from trying by arranging for their nephews to succeed them. That's how the Catholic Church became the Trope Namer for Nepotism. There's also at least one suspected case of a Pope being succeeded by his illegitimate son, since the requirement of celibacy wasn't always actually obeyed. And in 2013, the Pope Emeritus Ratzinger (formerly Pope Benedict XVI) proved that the office isn't necessarily for life. While papal resignation had been on the books of Catholic Canon Law for as long as the records go back, it had been nearly 600 years since the last time a Pope had done so and over 700 years since a Pope had resigned willingly rather than at the point of a sword.
  • While there hasn't been a Pope elected who wasn't currently a Cardinal in over six hundred years (Urban VI was the last, an archbishop before election), the only qualifications are that the person is a baptized, male practicing Catholic, of which there are over 600 million. That gives the Papacy the largest amount of possible candidates out of any elected office in the world.
• France and its predecessor, the kingdom of the Franks, was at times, but the Carolingians and the Capetians both eventually overcame this by kings having sons crowned (nominally as co-regents) while they were still alive^note  On a few occasion these sons died before their fathers — it is not without significance that when this happened they were not included in the official numbering of kings of France. as a form of multilayered Loophole Abuse. Eventually, after several generations of doing this, the monarchy became hereditary (again). But the process was not totally irreversible, there was a period when the great lords of France alternated between making a Carolingian and a Capetian (then called Robertinian) king of France. Also, in Germany and Italy, the other successors state to the Frankish kingdom, attempts by various kings and emperors to do the same thing did not prevent their monarchy from becoming elective, with the Italic one eventually collapsing and being attached to the German one.
• The Most Serene Republic of Venice was one for all intents and purposes, given that the head of state (dux/doge/duke) was elected for life by the Great Council. Venetians being Venetians, the procedure was made an absurdly complex set of elections and lotteries to choose the actual electors to make sure it couldn't be fixed, with the doge being then presented to the people with the words "This is your doge, if it please you", as the people of Venice had the power to reject him and restart the whole mess (this ended in 1423 with the election of Francesco Foscari, as he and his successors were presented to the people with the words "This is your doge"). There was an attempt to give up with the election and turn it into a hereditary monarchy, but the plot was discovered and the offending doge and his co-conspirators were executed. Faliero was then subject to a damnatio memoriae treatment, with his official portrait displayed in the Doge's Palace being removed. In its place was painted a black shroud and an inscription listing this why this was done.
• The King of Cambodia is elected by a council, even if there is a successor available, though the succession is limited to the two royal families. The current king, Norodom Sihamoni, just happens to be the son of the previous one (Norodom Sihanouk, who reigned as the first king of Cambodia's post-communist monarchy), but Sihamoni himself has no children.
• Until 2022, the Grand Master of the Order of Malta^note an entity with a unique status in the international law and thus akin to a state on its own, despite having no territory as such except for the buildings it uses as residenceswas elected for life (from then on it's for 10 years).
• The King of Saudi Arabia is also technically elected. Technically, because of two caveats:
  1. When the electors (the most senior princes of the House of Saud) vote, the King is generally still alive, and they thus usually elect a Crown Prince, to succeed the current King when he dies. Theoretically, if the King and Crown Prince die within a very short span of time, the princes might have to elect a King, but this has never happened.
  2. Until 2015, the prince-electors always elected the most-senior male member of the House of Saud deemed qualified for the job (some princes are ill, uninterested, or otherwise under suspicion, and thus aren't candidates in the first place). From 1953 until the custom ended in the 2015, this meant, basically, the oldest surviving son of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud. That's right—it's been over sixty years since the man died, and until 2015, none of his grandsons were even close to the throne. However, in 2015, the decision was made to skip the last few sons of Abdul Aziz and hand the Crown Prince position to one of the grandsons, Muhammad bin Nayef. Then, in 2017, the family surprised everyone again by electing a younger grandson, Muhammad bin Salman, who (significantly) is a son of the reigning king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz.
• The Mongols traditionally elected a Great Khan by and from among the Khans, who were more-or-less lords without landed estates because of the whole "nomad" thing. This is in fact what "Genghis" means-that "Great Khan"'s real name was Temujin.
• Anglo-Saxons were this, sort of. The Witenagemot, "council of wise men," was a council of the most important nobles and bishops in the kingdom, and they were the ones who had the final say on who among the king's elgigible heirs would ascend the throne. This has been exaggerated by patriotic Englishmen who wanted to emphasize the Saxons' democratic virtues; all sorts of criteria could interfere, including the will of the previous monarch and sometimes simply Asskicking Leads to Leadership. As often as not, the Witenagemot would simply rubber-stamp the king's eldest son or chosen heir. Nonetheless it was something of an elective monarchy.
• A variation among various Celtic clans was called "Tanistry" in which the elders elected the heir to the chiefdom rather than the chief. Among other things, this would make it less likely that an election needed to be held during a Succession Crisis: if the old chief was suddenly killed in battle before his clan had time to discuss an impending succession the successor was ready. This custom carried on for a long time and was brought to America by Scots-Irish. It is notable though perhaps coincidental that the election for President of the United States always finishes several months before the previous one leaves office. The last vestige of this tradition is found in the title of Ireland's deputy prime minister... Tánaiste.
  • The period when Scotland was switching from this system to the more common primogeniture approach is the scene of one of Shakespeare's more famous plays-the title character of which is visibly shocked when the king names one of his sons as "Prince of Cumberland" (i.e., heir apparent). Following Duncan's murder, he's elected king, due to being a popular war hero who just saved them from a Norwegian invasion. In reality, Tanistry in Scotland had, by Macbeth's time, become a system where the succession alternated routinely between different branches of the MacAlpine family. This was why Macbeth believed he had a right to take the throne: it was his branch's turn.
• The Crown of Aragon. Even though the elected king was almost invariably his predecessor's heir, the electors had little trouble reminding the candidate that they, in theory, could choose anyone, as this quotation from a 14th-century knight shows:
  [E]ach of us is as much as thou, but [we] all put together are much more than thou.
• The Visigothic Kingdom took this to its logical extreme with a ridiculously powerful noble council that not only had the power to elect kings (with at least one king, Wamba, allegedly being elected against his will and at swordpoint), but also to depose them almost as they pleased. This made civil wars common, since rival factions often just denounced previous elections as invalid and chose their own king as the real one. Of 37 kings that reigned between the sack of Rome (410) and the death of the last one (721),^note This doesn't count rebels who failed to take control of the capital and are thus not counted in official lists, yet styled themselves as kings. 11 were murdered for sure, three more were deposed but not killed, and quite a handful more died in circumstances that are deemed suspicious.
• For most of its history, Ancient Rome practices this, though the details varied with the period:
  • In their earliest time the Romans were ruled by kings, that were elected in a rather complicated way: once the reigning king was dead, the Senate would nominate an interrex (king ad interim) for five days (after which he had to name a successor with the Senate's approval), who would choose a candidate for kingship and present it to the Senate for approval; if the Senate approved, the nominee would be brought before the Curiate Assembly (the assembly of all Roman citizens, even if only patricians could actually vote), presided over by the interrex for the occasion, for approval; if the Curiate Assembly approved, the nominee became king, but, the king also being the high priest, an augur (a priest tasked with interpreting the will of the gods by observing the flight of birds) would have to give his own approval; if the augur announced that the gods approved, the king was finally king, but to actually have the power he would have to summon the Curiate Assembly and propose a law in which he was given the imperium (absolute power), and if the bill passed he would finally be the king.
    • According to legend, they still managed to screw this up (first the sixth legendary king Servius Tullius skipped part of the process and, in spite of being a good king, was murdered in the Senate by his son-in-law for this, and then said son-in-law, Tarquinius Superbus, seized the throne but managed to piss off the people and barely escaped Rome with his life), so at one point they took away all power but part of the religious one, with the annual ceremony Regifugum (Flight of the King) having the king (now called rex sacrorum, king of sacrifices) interpreting Tarquinius Superbus' part as he was deposed and forced to run for his life to make sure he won't have funny ideas. In this form the kingly office actually continued even during the Empire, before being abolished by the Christian emperor Theodosius I as part of his campaign against surviving pagan practices.
  • The Roman Republic (a Hereditary Republic) effectively transitioned into The Roman Empire (this trope) from the reign of Augustus onwards with no clear point in time during which a contemporary could say the transition had taken place, with the Emperor being formally elected by the Senate (and, at the start, technically holding no power but the military one, with the Emperor's political power deriving from the other offices he was elected to again and again). Only very few emperors were "born to the purple" (i.e. presumptive heir upon birth or childhood) as the Julio-Claudian dynasty never had a straightforward father-son transition, the Flavian dynasty came to power when Vespasian's sons were already men and the "five good emperors" Nerva to Marcus Aurelius had no biological children bar the last one. It says a lot for the little regard the Romans held for the dynastic principle that the fact Marcus Aurelius (after exhausting other choices) made his son emperor (who did turn out a terrible ruler) is often seen as an incredible faux-pas and the beginning of the end. Most Emperors did however make their desired heir "co-emperor" during their lifetime and the savier ones tried to get them a military command and have the senate rubber stamp the appointment to have two of the three bases of power (the third being the urban masses in Rome, who started making their will known through the deposition and execution of Nero) in their corner from the get-go.
  • The Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire) initially continued with the old system, complete with their own Senate in Constantinople, though they eventually managed to make the office mostly dynastic - thus diminishing the civil wars that had destroyed the Western Roman Army and led to the Western Empire's fall. The Senate however maintained its formal authority, with their last known act being deposing co-emperors Isaac II and Alexius IV and elect Nikolaos Kanabos as new Emperor (against his will, prompting him to run in the Hagia Sophia and paving the way for Alexios Doukas Mourtzouphlos, the one who effectively deposed the co-emperors, to rise to the throne). The throne finally became fully dynastic by the 14th century with the dissolution of the Senate, as the actual electoral body had disappeared.
• Andorra is an odd example. It is ruled by two co-princes (technically making it a diarchy rather than a monarchy). One of them used to be the King of France but after the French Revolution the position has been held by the President of France, an elected official, though elected by citizens of France rather than Andorra. The other, the Bishop of Urgell (in Spain) is (being a Catholic bishop) ultimately appointed by the Pope (in a complicated process also involving the local archbishop, the Roman Curia, and the Apostolic Nuncio—i.e. Vatican Ambassador—to the country).
• The King of the Belgians nominates his heir, but Parliament must confirm, and may choose another member of the royal family.
• In Kuwait, the Emir appoints with the advice and consent of the National Assembly, a "Crown Prince and Deputy Emir", who is a member of the Al Sabah clan, but not someone in his immediate family. Jabar, the emir from 1977 to 2006, hadn't bothered to appoint anyone else after his successor, Saad, fell ill—too ill to become Emir—so when he died, the Assembly passed him over for another relative, Sabah.
• Oman experienced something to this effect when Sultan Qaboos, who ruled the country from 1970 to 2020, died without naming an heir (Qaboos never married or had children, and was rumored to be gay). A council was assembled and elected Qaboos' cousin Haitham as sultan, and Haitham subsequently changed Oman's ambiguous succession so the current sultan's eldest son will automatically become Crown Prince. Thus, Haitham's son Theyazin is now his clear successor.
• The Kingdom of Hawai'i had the king's choice of heir confirmed by a council of nobles and later parliament. When the House of Kamehameha failed, the noble chosen by parliament called for a referendum to confirm it.
• Malaysia:
  • Nine out of the thirteen states have hereditary rulers. Every five years, they choose among themselves a Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King), the head of state of the country. In practice, the position rotates among the nine rulers based on the seniority of the rulers when the system was created.
  • One of the states, Negeri Sembilan ^note Coincidentally, the name means "Nine States", as it is traditionally divided into nine chiefdoms is an elective monarchy itself. The ruler, Yang di-Pertuan Besar, is chosen from the princes of the royal family by a council of chiefs. Negeri Sembilan's elective monarchy long predates Malaysia's (it was brought by the Minangkabau when they immigrated to Malaya from their homeland in Sumatra circa the 15th century), and actually inspired the first Prime Minister of Malaysia to institute the country's current elective monarchy following its independence from the United Kingdom.
• While it is hard to know for sure (one of the few written sources on the matter is not always reliable or all that detailed when it comes to that matter), some historians suppose this is what happened with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in biblical times. During the reign of Kings Saul, David and Solomon the king was strong/convincing/charismatic enough to convince the nobles in the part where being king wasn't hereditary to support the same candidate where it was. The whole system broke down when they could not agree on a successor to King Solomon and hence the two states split.
• Many Native American tribes had elected rulers (who Europeans invariably called "kings" though in many cases they probably didn't qualify), such as the Iroquois, where chiefs were chosen by clan elders (both male and female). However, the position was still mostly always male. The Aztec emperors (Huey Tlatoque) were not hereditary, but elected by a consensus of the elites.
  • This was also common in Central America, for example in the Aztec-influenced Nicoya Kingdom of Costa Rica the king was elected by a council of elders. To this date several recognized tribes in Panama and Costa Rica choose their caciques this way, although the role is mainly symbolic as both countries are republics. Recently for the first time in history a woman was chosen as cacique of the ngobe people.
• In the Islamic World, the Caliphs, successors to Muhammad, were originally elected by consensus of the community. The first four Caliphs, Rashidun Caliphate were elected in this fashion as Sunni Muslims believed Muhammad had originally intended (thus creating a schism between themselves and Shia Muslims, who believed it should be hereditary) before Muawiyah, the fifth caliph,^note Contrary to popular perception, Muhammad himself was not a caliph; the very word caliph means "successor" in Arabic, in this case referring to the successors of Muhammad, who had no official title aside from being the Last Prophet. averted this trope and turned the Caliphate into what is known as the Umayyad Dynasty, a hereditary monarchy.
• Historically done by the various monarchies that had claimed rulership over Italy, though in different manners every time. Aside for the Roman Empire, we have:
  • Odoacer's Regnum Italicum (Italic Kingdom) was nominally elective, with the Roman Senate electing the king. In actual practice this didn't happen, as Zeno, Eastern Roman Emperor, saw him as a potential rival and had Italy conquered by the Ostrogoths.
  • In the Ostrogothic Regnum Italiae the nobles had the power to elect and depose the king as they pleased, similar to their relatives the Visigoths. In practive, however, the nobles exercised the right to depose the king only during the war with the Eastern Roman Empire, when the elder Theodahad proved himself unable to stop the invasion, his successor Witiges was captured in battle and carried off to Constantinople, and Eraric tried to surrender for money.
  • The Lombards' Regnum Totius Italiae (Kingdom of All Italy) was a more traditional elected monarchy, with the king elected among the Dukes.
  • The Carolingian Regnum Italiae (or Regnum Italicum) was a Frankish-style elective monarchy, that for a while continued keeping the Imperial Crown. Eventually that was abandoned, and disputes among the nobles led to the Kings of Germany to overwhelm the Italic Kingdom and attach its (eventually largely nominal) crown to the German one as part of the Holy Roman Empire.
  • During the Wars of Italian Independence, most of Italy had been conquered by the Kingdom of Sardinia led by the House of Savoy, that legitized the conquests through plebiscites and then used the same means to elect Victor Emmanuel II as King of Italy.
  • During World War II, one of the demands of the Italian patriots to continue supporting the monarchy was for a referendum to either confirm or remove the monarchic regime to be held after victory. Due to King Victor Emmanuel III abdicating about a month before the referendum, thus reminding everyone why they were holding it in the first place, the referendum resulted in 54% in favor of a republic, with the new king, Umberto II, who had already proved himself an exceptional ruler as a regent, choosing exile rather than pointing out the possibility of a fraud and causing a civil war.
  • In the current Italian constitution, the President of the Republic has effectively all the powers the king used to have (up to include being protected by a lèse-majesté law) but is elected by the Parliament in a joint session, plus the delegates of the regions, for a seven years term. There's no legal limit to the number of terms a President can serve, but in practice they traditionally serve only one.^note The eleventh, Giorgio Napolitano, was the first to serve twice, but had to be candidated by others that feared the political instability at the time would deadlock the election of any other candidate, and he only accepted to run, and was promptly elected, after the fifth ballot failed to produce a President. He would then resign in 2015 due to his advanced age. His successor Sergio Mattarella found himself in the same situation due his term expiring in the middle of political instability while the most popular Senators refused to be candidated, and was elected at the eight ballot after the political leaders in the Parliaments asked him to let himself be candidated.
• It's not quite clear due to the sources all being problematic (epic poetry written down centuries later, Romans and Greeks who may or may not have had first hand accounts and who most likely didn't speak the language) and scant, but it seems the default state of Germanic tribes around 0 CE was to have no leader in peacetime (or collective leadership) and an election for a leader in the event of war. Scholars debate how exactly this system worked and it is very likely that there were variations in detail from place to place and during time, but the fact that relatively small tribes with relatively hands-off leadership could not compete militarily with the Roman Empire may have led to the formation of larger groups like the Goths or the Franks^note The term "Franks" means something like "the free ones" and seems to have been chosen as a self-designation, perhaps of a military formation. There are some scholars of the time period who think what are often treated like "ethnic groups" by Roman authors were rather multiethnic military alliances. Again, our sources are too scant and imprecise to say for sure, but DNA evidence is increasingly being used to argue for and against various interpretations by the time of the Age of Migrations.
• The Dalai Lama ruled Tibet both as part of the Qing dynasty and as a de facto/de jure (depends on who you ask) independent Kingdom. The Dalai Lama is the highest-ranking religious leader of the Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism and considered the manifestation or Avatar of the Buddha Avalokitesvara, a Boddhisatva, thus his selection is made as a child after a series of rituals and studies to verify if he or she is indeed the rebirth of the previous one. Thus, they're in practice elected by high-ranking lamas. However, it is much less of an example now than it used to be, as not only the Tibetan government has been operating from exile since 1959 due to the Chinese takeover, but also the Dalai Lama himself delegated the political administration to the more regular secular government in 2011, remaining a spiritual leader only.
• The Islamic Republic of Iran is effectively a monarchy, but not because it is a Hereditary Republic. It has presidents, who have terms and are elected by the people just fine, but the presidents only have as much power as the Supreme Leader dictates. The Supreme Leader is also elected, not by the people but by the Assembly of Experts, and while the office is not hereditary, the Supreme Leader serves for life. The Supreme Leader also happens to be a high-ranking religious leader, making the country very much like the Vatican City in being a theocratic absolute monarchy. The difference (aside from which religion the theocracy adheres to) being that whereas the Vatican has no permanent population and less than 500 Catholic Church officials living in it, Iran is a large country with nearly 87 million citizens.