I was reading an online blog when I came across this article. This passage really stood out:
Now I will admit my knowledge of science fiction is very limited. But it does seem sf tends to focus on dictatorships or monarchies. You don’t seem to see many stories where people worry about getting initiatives through legislatures or trying to sway public opinion. Am I right? If I am, why do you think this is so? And if not, what good sf could you recommend that does focus on the democratic method?
No. In fact it is often the opposite, where the protagonist is working to restore or install a democracy by ousting a dictatorship. Like the *rest *of the Star Wars movies. What SF abhors, generally, is bureaucracy.
Honor Harrington’s universe the Manticoran ‘Monarchy’ is more or less like Britain, they have a monarch, balanced by some democracy. They have a House of Lords and a House of Commons and political wheeling and dealing with votes, and they are concerned about what the commoners want in the later books. The main enemy claims to be a republic but is more like the old Soviet Union, only one real party. I think earth is a democracy of some sort, and there are an assortment of governmnets ranging from outright dictators through democracy in the little not really mentioned system/governments. There is actually one pirate government until they get thrashed.
ELizabeth Moon’s universe has a clan based electoral government [purportedy like Imperial Rome, the commoners in the clan vote and the clan reps are supposed to represent them in a way like our states are represented in congress and senate, though they have one council.]
Vorkosiverse has Beta colony which is aggressively democratic, to Barrayar that is an Emperor that is working around to slipping in a bit of democracy. Escobar and Athos, quaddispace, Cryoburn’s planets, Komarr are sort of democratic to various extents, Jackson’s Whole is a kleptocracy.
Various other authors have SF based on earth and earth future colonies that are democratic.
I think literature as a whole finds democracy inconvenient to write about, because it’s easier to write about a character who decides to do something and then does it, without having to work through a legislative process, or deal with checks and balances (particularly in SF where there’s so much else going on in the story).
But there are plenty of functioning democracies in science fiction - David Weber’s Honor Harrington series has a queen, but she’s part of a constitutional monarchy, and the arc of the series includes the restoration of democracy to the Republic of Haven. Doc Smith has a presidential election as a major plot point in one of the Lensman books. The nearly utopian Beta colony in Lois McMaster Bujold’s fiction is a democracy (with starship crews often voting on how the ship should be run). Heinlein’s “For Us the Living” features a democracy, and when his stranded students form a government in “Tunnel in the Sky” it’s democratic also.
Science fiction likes to push the boundaries of what’s familiar and comfortable. Since most science fiction writers and readers live in democracies, they write about non-democracies to keep things interesting.
Earth is part of (capitol of, in fact) the Solarian League, the largest political entity in the Galaxy. It’s nominally democratic, but in practice it’s so big and sprawling that there’s no system of central government that would work efficiently for it. In practice, it’s fractured into a bunch of spheres of influence with a very diverse set of systems of government, which interact with each other very little. The planet Beowulf, for instance, is about everything you could ask for in a democracy, and de facto independent from the rest of the League, but many of the fringe worlds are, in effect, governed by a branch of the Solarian Navy.
The Star Trek Federation.
I just read that article that the OP linked.
I wonder how many other posters have looked at it. We’re commenting on a thesis written by someone who claims that Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is his main venture into anarchy as a means of governing people. The author of the article has taken the initial scenario for the novel and presented it as if it were representative of the whole. In truth, one of the major plots of the novel is the establishment of the Lunar Republic!
It certainly changes how I look at the rest of the article.
From Futurama there is the Democratic Order Of Planets. Better known as DOOP. 
In Christopher Stasheff’s Warlock series, the protagonist is an agent of an interstellar democratic government tasked with locating colonies that were lost during a period when a totalitarian regime held power. When the agency locates a lost colony, if it isn’t doesn’t already have a democratic government, the agency intervenes to push it toward one. The colony the protagonist finds is ruled by a monarchy in crisis, and he sets out to convert it to a constitutional monarchy as a step toward a democratic society.
Bear in mind, the article itself is bullshit and should be treated as such. The author doesn’t seem to know much about democracy or government or anything other than a few sci fi stories.
SF doesn’t “fear” democracy. In spite of what nerds and geeks seem to think, they are made-up stories. Not real predictors of the future. Authors do not write about future governments made of feudal lords, hereditary monarchies and galactic empires because that is the future. They write about it because it sounds cool.
I’m reminded of the Sten series and its afterword. The protagonist starts as the loyal servant of the Emperor, and only near the end when the Emperor goes all Caligula does Sten realize that he’s been working for what was essentially the main villain all along. Not because the Emperor (originally) meant badly or was bad at his job, but because keeping an empire together requires that you force it upon the unwilling. In the afterword, the authors comment on the propensity of science fiction to lionize monarchy and aristocracy (they mention Van Vogt as an example), and in part they wrote the series as a commentary on how ruthless and nasty even the most well meaning Empire would have to be to maintain power.
In Star Wars, the Galactic Republic lasted over twenty-five thousand years. The Galactic Empire lasted about thirty.
Yeah - it makes me not want to read the article at all.
I got to the part where the author referred to Winston Churchill as “Winnie the Chill,” and decided that what society really needs is more disintegration chambers.
Because blowing up the Death Star makes for a better story than a leading a voter registration drive.
Democracies, drawing impetus from the masses, tend toward a sort of conservatism that is substantially superstition & wishful thinking in practice. Democracies fear science fiction and science. So the enmity definitely goes both ways.
I know you didn’t just pull that out of your ass, so I’d love a source.
Yep - remember how all the scientists fled America for Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II?
A disproportionate number of science fiction writers are libertarians. (At least, it feels like a disproportionate number compared to other types of fiction where overt libertarian doctrine is rarely encountered. Those identifying with libertarian philosophies are heavily male, two-thirds according to the latest Pew political typology. Hard sf writers are more likely to be male, with a large engineering contingent, and it appears that engineers correlate well with libertarianism. Have I qualified that enough?)
Libertarianism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Democracy assumes that the weakest member is political equal to the strongest, even if it often doesn’t work out that way in practice. Democracy assumes a cacophony of beliefs, opinions, viewpoints, and slants. Democracy requires government to make the rest of society functional. Libertarians viscerally disagree with all of these. They want words in which everybody thinks exactly like them; in fact, that’s an axiom of their belief structure because no libertarian world can exist if everybody doesn’t equally subscribe to the tenets of the world-builder. Lots of explicitly libertarian sf exists, and lots of sf that mouths approval of democracy says implicitly that their worlds are run by and for the elite, i.e. people who think just like them, and the plot is the protagonist realizing this and becoming part of the elite.
Democracy is messy. Democracy fails repeatedly. Democracy is full of inertia. Democracy rewards passionate minorities, even when their passions are bigotry. Democracy is impossible to describe coherently. That makes it a particularly, perhaps uniquely, horrible system to build a narrative around. Libertarianism simplifies this process, and so do monarchism and totalitarianism and utopianism and several other isms, some real and some fantasy. That makes for better genre fiction, just as assuming the police are kindly, competent, and helpful or vicious corrupt thugs simplifies crime fiction. One assumption and you’re free to work out your plot without needing to explain everything as you go along.
So, yeah, science fiction hates democracy for a variety of reasons. Don’t be fooled by its trappings. There’s no democracy in Star Wars. It’s all about the interregnum between the past democracy and the future democracy, giving you only the good parts, the battle against evil.
Its really the difference between fiction and science fiction. With fiction, either historical or present day, you can choose to either pick the era or slot your story in between real life current events and personalities.
Science fiction, which is mostly space opera for this purpose needs friction to throw battle fleets at someone. Both listed forms of government are the easiest to start wars without the messy forms of parliament or congress getting in the way. The authors are simply writing to their constituencies, and eliminating the process by which military action is authorized.
In my opinion its not really science fiction, but Eric Flints 16xx series is probably the place to start, followed by CJ Cherryh’s cyteen and that alien series of hers on the space opera side.
Declan