Kevin Vallier:
Here’s my qualified defense of the royal wedding. Some studies find that democracies with powerless monarchs tend to have more trusting citizens than democracies without them. One theory about why this is is that democracies with monarchs have a non-partisan, largely powerless head of state that people with different political ideologies can rally around. Perhaps a royal wedding is a pretty harmless way of making this source of social unity salient and so may increase social unity without a war or stoking
