it's hard to get into a system where you elect leaders for a certain period of time (and you can kick them out if you don't like them) if a faction of the country thinks ultimate authority is in this one person, and is in that one person until he dies, at which point it gets passed down to his eldest son. I mean, it's possible - Japan and Britain both have figureheads that the country obsesses over - but I think it's harder for a country these days to make the transition to a democracy if they still have a monarch. It's harder to do "reformasi total," so to speak, because the king is still there and he's above political change. different types of power dynamics.