Happy and glorious? The sometimes-unifying effects of the British monarchy

Abstract

Do monarchs unify? This article is the first to test whether monarchs promote unity by increasing national pride and decreasing political animus (affective polarization). Using two waves of an original survey experiment on thousands of British participants, we show that priming respondents to think favorably of the monarchy increased feelings of national pride and indirectly reduced affective polarization. Surprisingly however, this effect is only found when measuring affective polarization using social distance and not feeling thermometer items. This suggests that the monarchy has the capacity to reduce feelings of hostility towards fellow countrymen but may not reduce hostility towards political parties. In exploratory analyses we also found treatment increased respondents’ conviction that Scotland and Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK, also mediated by national pride. Our results recommend monarchies in democracies as a promising field for future research by political scientists.