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To answer the question of how a democratic form of government could slide into empire, we have to define a few terms and make a few guesses about the nature of the Republic. In our galaxy, the word “republic” originates from the Latin res publica, the realm of public life outside of private affairs. The term’s meaning is roughly equivalent to what we would call the “commonwealth” or “common good.” Palpatine’s government may be a republic in this simple sense alone: it recognizes and works for the common good. In Attack of the Clones, Anakin voices an idea of what a good republic ought to do. “We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, agree to what’s in the best interest of all the people, and then do it,” he says to Padmé.

But some might argue that “republicanism” means more than just recognition of the common good. Government should be built on the idea that the freedom of its citizens is essential, they say, but their freedom depends on their taking part in government. Their participation includes protecting themselves from the arbitrary influence of others.130 Such protection can be secured in lots of different ways, perhaps most importantly through justifiable restrictions on the power of both government and certain collective interests like corporations and special-interest groups. However the republican tradition in political thought also stresses that citizens must be active participants in political life according to moral or civic duty. Rather than simply defining what republics have been historically, this way of thinking has moral importance—it makes a statement about how political life contributes to the good life, and what we ought to do to achieve it.

“The problem,” writes Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, “is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”131 Rousseau poses the thorny question of how to balance the group needs that we all share and that can’t be served without collective action with the dignity and autonomy (or self-rule) of the individual.

The Republic also seems to have certain features of a democracy. Democracies need two ideals as essential ingredients of their laws and institutions: self-government and equality. Since every inhabitant of Naboo, Coruscant, Dantooine, Kashyyk and all the others can’t be expected to vote on every issue before the Senate, they interpret “self-government” the same way we do in America—in terms of a representative democracy. This is the preferred option for any large, heavily populated democracy for obvious reasons. There have been direct democracies, though, in which individual citizens do vote on everything. We can’t conclude that simply because the Republic seems to be a democracy, every planetary system within it is also ruled by the people. Naboo, for example, democratically elects its queen, but it’s implied in The Phantom Menace that the Gungans haven’t had a say in the larger political affairs of the planet for some time.

So, is the Republic founded on the ideal of equality as well? By this we can’t suggest that in a democracy everyone is born equal in terms of their talents, capacities, social or economic status. Obviously the set of our natural endowments is virtually unique to each individual. Instead, equality in a democracy usually means equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal standing under the law. Civil rights laws, welfare systems, public education, and trial by a jury of one’s peers have all been used to promote this kind of equality. But in the Star Wars galaxy, it’s clear that this kind of equality isn’t treated as a universal standard. Certain societies, such as the Jedi Order, seem to function based on hierarchical, not democratic principles. There are planets like Tatooine where slavery is not only legal, but also the basis of the economy; but as Shmi Skywalker points out, Tatooine isn’t part