Not sure where to live, but interested in democracy? Lacking Wikipedia to learn about prospective nations to move to? You can make some intelligent guesses based on the country’s full, official name.
Places that include “people,” “arab,” “islamic,” “socialist” or (ironically) “democratic” in their name probably rank pretty poorly, democracy-wise. On the other hand “commonwealth” and (also ironically) “principality” is a pretty good sign of a democratic nation.
(via Neatorama)
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A few years ago, writer David Weber was the guest of honor at Loscon. (I think it may have been the last Loscon I went to.) At one point he told a story about how, when writing the first Honor Harrington novel, they got 99% of the way through printing — it was typeset and everything — when his editor called him up, having realized that they’d gotten the national paradigm backwards. The heroes were in the Royal Manticoran Navy, and the villains were the Republic of Haven.
So they went back and forth, trying to figure out how they could change it without re-typesetting the book, and one of them came up with the idea, “What if it’s the People’s Republic of Haven?” They went through the proofs and found that they could insert the word in a couple of places without messing up the pagination, and stuck with the change for the later books in the series.
Actually, the Honorverse does a nice job (if sometimes heavy-handed in the historic allusion) demonstrating how a constitutional monarchy can be a fine thing (short-sighted politics aside), and how a republic — esp. a “people’s republic” — can be a bread-and-circuses tyranny.
In the analysis above, I believe that “republic” was a neutral word in terms of what it indicated.