In non-political settings, or anything not based on a real-world government, the local government and how it got its power or where it derives its power tends to be really vague. Sometimes there's a princess or two hanging around since, you know. But generally speaking, all we have to go by is that good rulers are good rulers and bad rulers are bad rulers, without any sort of explanation about how exactly things are run. For tax policy, as an example, at best you might get "good rulers don't tax and evil ones do", without really explaining how anyone funds anything without taxes.