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If you know the four levels of society -- Band, Tribe, Cheifdom, and State -- you know that the Republic of Star Wars doesn't fit any of them.
It's too big and too complex to function even as a State-level society, which are prone to cycles of rising and falling.
There must be some level beyond the State at which the Republic is organized. This would neatly explain why its political system makes no sense at all. We, as viewers, are limited to seeing glimpses of a system -- let's call it a Galatic-level society -- that we can't understand because we don't have anything like it on Earth.
It does share features with a State-level society: a ruling elite, non-kin relationships, and slavery on a massive scale. However, the specialization has gone beyond the extreme -- there is an entire culture, the Jedi, who do nothing but peacekeeping functions, and warfare has been turned over to disposable classes like droids and clones. The communications system and travel time between the center of power and the outlying sectors are probably what limits the size of such a society, as a lot of its beaurucractic functions are either run by droids, or heavily dependant on computers. There is also the curiously non-decentralized structure of the droid army in TPM, which may be a cultural mandated control mechanism to keep droids from running amok enmass.
It's too big and too complex to function even as a State-level society, which are prone to cycles of rising and falling.
There must be some level beyond the State at which the Republic is organized. This would neatly explain why its political system makes no sense at all. We, as viewers, are limited to seeing glimpses of a system -- let's call it a Galatic-level society -- that we can't understand because we don't have anything like it on Earth.
It does share features with a State-level society: a ruling elite, non-kin relationships, and slavery on a massive scale. However, the specialization has gone beyond the extreme -- there is an entire culture, the Jedi, who do nothing but peacekeeping functions, and warfare has been turned over to disposable classes like droids and clones. The communications system and travel time between the center of power and the outlying sectors are probably what limits the size of such a society, as a lot of its beaurucractic functions are either run by droids, or heavily dependant on computers. There is also the curiously non-decentralized structure of the droid army in TPM, which may be a cultural mandated control mechanism to keep droids from running amok enmass.
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