I came across an article describing Rene Girard's thought, summarizing:
Monarchy, he hypothesizes, has its origins in the role of the sacrificed scapegoat as the unifier and redeemer of the community; it developed when scapegoats managed to delay their own ritual murder and secured a fixed place at the center of a society. A king is a living scapegoat who has been deified, and can become a scapegoat again, as Girard illustrates in his reading of the myth of Oedipus (Oedipus begins as an outsider, goes on to become king, and is ultimately punished for the community’s ills, channeling collective violence toward himself, and returned to his outsider status).
Does Girard's claim have a solid basis in historical fact?
I know not much of other countries, but in Bu-yeo (a.k.a North Bu-yeo), an ancient Korean (despite being located in modern-day China) kingdom, similar practices did exist. The king (more like a leader of a few major tribes) was deemed responsible for crop failures or other catastrophes. We can know this from Volume 30, Book of Wei, Records of the Three Kingdoms. It reads that the old customs of Bu-yeo mandated that the king must be killed in case of catastrophes such as droughts or floods, resulting in a poor yield of crops.