The Child's Conception of the Queen and the Prime Minister

What difference does it make that Britain has a monarch? ‘Some political scientists,’ as Edward Shils and Michael Young remarked at the time of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, ‘tend to speak as if Britain is now an odd kind of republic which happens to have as its chief functionary a Queen instead of a President’.2 Shils and Young felt that the intensity of public interest in the coronation quite clearly belied such a commonsense and demystified interpretation of British politics. Two decades later, signs of lively interest in the monarch still abound, as do the many royal activities that sustain that interest: the investiture of the Prince of Wales, the BBC film of the Royal Family, the London walkabout of the Royal Family, the engagement and wedding of Princess Anne. Even controversies over such matters as the size of the Civil List appear to enhance interest in the monarchy. Yet in this era of empirical political studies there has been little systematic analysis of the impact of the monarchy on Britain. The evidence is especially weak about the impact of what Bagehot considered to be the monarchy's most important function — not the occasional and subtle royal initiatives at