Do they have a say in making laws or any diplomatic decision of the country?
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Depends what country you’re referring to, there are about 30 that have a monarchy and it varies from an occasional ceremonial appearance to ruling the country like a dictator.
It depends on what country’s royal family you are talking about.
For example here in the UK, the head of state has political power in the form of vetting (something Elizabeth II did with more than 1,000 laws via something called Queen’s/King’s Consent).
Queen’s/King’s Consent is a parliamentary convention under which Crown consent is sought whenever a proposed parliamentary bill will affect the Crown’s own prerogatives or interests.
In political theory, every sovereign nation has a source of “legitimate” governmental power, aka “authority.” For Constitutional Democracies (the US for example), the legitimate source of authority is the people being governed who give that power to the duly elected representative government. For monarchies, the legitimate source of authority is the royal family. Even if the government chooses to utilize a constitutional democracy to exercise legitimate authority such as used in Japan.
I theory the monarch of the UK can veto laws and suspend parliament whenever they want. In practice they don’t get involved with governing the country and are just a figurehead. They do perform various foreign and domestic visits to try and enhance domestic morale and increase the the standing of the UK abroad.
Here in Belgium we have a “hereditary parliamentary constitutional monarchy”.
So this means the title goes from the monarch to the next family member in the line of succession.
The elected parliament makes the laws, the government (all the ministers) implements those laws and the King signs the law as head of state. In this function he symbolises the entire population of the country. But he can only do so with the approval of a member of the government who cosigns.
The king is also the commander in chief of the armed forces, but this is a symbolic function. Again, to represent that the army serves/works for the entire population. Traditionally, all the monarchs have actual military training and are actual officers in one of the branches. But once they become monarch, they get the highest military title.
So all this means that the king has no actual direct power, but he is the symbol of the nation. The Constitution defines what he/she can and can’t do. He has advisors who inform him, and direct him to have certain meetings during government formation or daily political matters. So he can influence a bit. Professional politicians want to get reelected after all, or can be bribed, or work for personal gain in the short run sometimes… the king is there to be a neutral party, a link to our past, a form of continuity in an ever changing political landscape.
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