Editing Republic (section)

=== Ambiguities ===
The distinction between a republic and a monarchy is not always clear. The [[constitutional monarchies]] of the former British Empire and Western Europe today have almost all real political power vested in the elected representatives, with the monarchs only holding either theoretical powers, no powers or rarely used reserve powers. Real legitimacy for political decisions comes from the elected representatives and is derived from the will of the people. While hereditary monarchies remain in place, political power is derived from the people as in a republic. These states are thus sometimes referred to as [[crowned republic]]s.<ref>The novelist and essayist [[H. G. Wells]] regularly used the term crowned republic to describe the United Kingdom, for instance in his work ''A Short History of the World''. [[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]] in his poem ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20080817170129/http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tennyson/alfred/idylls/chapter13.html Idylls of the King] ''.</ref>

Terms such as "liberal republic" are also used to describe all of the modern liberal democracies.<ref>[[John Montfort Dunn|Dunn, John]]. "The Identity of the Bourgeois Liberal Republic". The Invention of the Modern Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.</ref>

There are also self-proclaimed republics that act similarly to absolute monarchies with absolute power vested in the leader and passed down from father to son. North Korea and Syria are two notable examples where a son has inherited political control. Neither of these states are officially monarchies. There is no constitutional requirement that power be passed down within one family, but it has occurred in practice.

There are also [[elective monarchy|elective monarchies]] where ultimate power is vested in a monarch, but the monarch is chosen by some manner of election. A current example of such a state is [[Malaysia]] where the [[Yang di-Pertuan Agong]] is elected every five years by the [[Conference of Rulers]] composed of the nine hereditary rulers of the [[Malay states]], and the [[Vatican City-State]], where the [[pope]] is selected by cardinal-electors, currently all [[Cardinal (Catholicism)|cardinals]] under the age of 80. While rare today, elective monarchs were common in the past. The Holy Roman Empire is an important example, where each new emperor was chosen by a group of electors. Islamic states also rarely employed [[primogeniture]], instead relying on various forms of election to choose a monarch's successor.

The [[Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth]] had an elective monarchy, with a wide suffrage of some 500,000 nobles. The system, known as the [[Golden Liberty]], had developed as a method for powerful landowners to control the crown. The proponents of this system looked to classical examples, and the writings of the Italian Renaissance, and called their elective monarchy a ''[[rzeczpospolita]]'', based on ''res publica''.