The politics of the galaxy far, far away take on many different forms, which is part of what makes them so ingrained into the plot of the series. The bottom line is that for all its focus on grand battles and epic journeys, Star Wars is essentially a political story. In the absence of civic virtue, their new Empire relied on propaganda. Even for the galaxy’s vilest characters, there was a political dimension to every action they took.
The major difference was that starting with Episode IV: A New Hope, the strictly political elements took place in the background - for example, we know that Palpatine and his advisers must have held meetings regarding how to stop a terrorist movement without engendering sympathy for it among unaffiliated bystanders. In the Original Trilogy, state-citizen tension manifested itself in the form of the Rebel Alliance and the questions that Mon Mothma’s movement posed for the Empire. Through carefully crafted speeches and secret plots, the newer trilogy showed us the fall of democracy itself. When Ben Kenobi told Luke that “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic,” that lit a firestorm of speculation about how exactly the Republic had fallen. In the Prequel Trilogy, this emphasis on politics was more pronounced: some of the most important developments in the first three films took place in the Republic Senate, as Palpatine twisted that august body to suit his needs. The Star Wars movies were about many things - good versus evil, The Hero’s Journey, tolerance versus oppression, and so on - but one of the most fundamental tensions in all six films concerned the relationship between the state and its people.
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