He’d seen theocracies all over paratime, and liked none of them; priests in political power usually made themselves insufferable, worse than any secu… - H. Beam Piper

Very high on the I love Rylla, reasons why list was the fact that the girl had a brain and wasn’t afraid to use it.

Those people, because of deforestation, bad agricultural methods and general mismanagement, are eroding away their arable soil at an alarming rate. At the same time, they are breeding like rabbits. In other words, each successive generation has less and less food to divide among more and more people, and for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they refuse to adopt any rational program of birth-control and population-limitation.
But, fortunately, they now have the atomic bomb, and they are developing radioactive poisons, weapons of mass-effect. And their racial, nationalistic and ideological conflicts are rapidly reaching the explosion point. A series of all-out atomic wars is just what that sector needs, to bring their population down to the world’s carrying capacity; in a century or so, the inventors of the atomic bomb will be held as the saviors of their species.

There's something wrong with democracy. If there weren't, it couldn't be overthrown by people like Makann, attacking it from within by democratic procedures. I don't think it's fundamentally unworkable. I think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. It's not safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and remedy them.