Monarchies of the World

What's the point of the button, I'd like to know.

I can't speak for anyone else but I like having an opportunity to read the instructions without losing valuable time on the clock. Wasted seconds are points lost!

But it also gives time to think about (or even look up) the answers before starting the quiz which is not a good thing IMO.

@ander but why would you even take the quiz then (if you, not you but you know ;), are gonna look up the answer anyway... no point then. You might aswell just read an encyclopedia

Then it's their loss.

There are many subnational monarchies in Africa.

When you look at the different presidents in Africa, I don't think we can really say that republicanism has been noticeably better than monarchy would have been.

I was taught never to trust Wikipedia. You never know when someone could edit the info. There are literally “Edit” buttons, and you just have to register.

But the King of Malaysia is also elected... that doesn't in itself mean he's not a monarch.

Sure, but why don't I get any e-mails from any of those places?

They aren't as generous as their Nigerian counterparts.

i wanna get sent money bye a nigerian prince

The USA has the oldest still-in-use written constitution in the world and has had a remarkably stable and long-continuous government, more than many other countries that most people think of as older which in fact have undergone multiple revolutions, coups, or reorganizations in recent history and so shouldn't really be thought of as old. Great Britain managed to stay out of the revolutions that swept across Europe in the 1800s but that makes them more the exception than the rule.

You're right I suppose, though the USA can also be said to be an exception to the rule rather than the rule because of how early it became independent and how rich it was destined to be because of its huge amount of natural resources. Also the fact that its native population was small enough compared to its immigrant population that the native population could be oppressed effectively, ensuring that they couldn't overthrow the government. Perhaps it is more to do with the fact that something needs to be going badly wrong internally in a country to persuade sufficiently many people to take part in a revolution. The Netherlands and Belgium were occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War, for example, but the population had no reason to start a revolution after the Nazis were gone and what was seen as the original government was restored.

Back in the 80s, when my dad was a medical student, the Bangladeshi government paid millions of dollars to the British government to get the broadcasting rights to some sort of royal wedding (Charles and Diana I think). My dad wrote a very critical editorial about the uselessness of it. This was at a time when most of Bangladesh was living in the most extreme of poverty, where famines were still common and barely anyone had access to electricity, let alone televisions. Why, he argued, was the government spending so much money on an ultimately worthless event that very few Bangladeshis could watch when it could spend that money helping the poor?

Thankfully things are better in Bangladesh now, but I still think he had a good point--why do people spend so much money and attention on people who are ultimately unimportant to our lives when we could focus our time and attention on the things that matter?

This time, I actually noticed during the quiz. I did worse, though...

The interesting part is their outcome. If they don't abolish it, they're running a risk of a corrupt leader. If they do, they're getting rid of the risk for no cost.

It's a stable, moneytheistic autonomous bankocracy - they won't do anything interesting that puts that in danger.