Dictatorship

"Well they [The Galactic Senate of the Republic] should be made to [resolve its differences]."
"By whom? Who's gonna make them?"
[...]
"Someone wise."
"Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me."
"Well, if it works…"

―Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala^[1]

Dictatorship was a form of government in which the ruler possessed absolute power and absolute authority, in contrast with democracy.^[2]

History

"People want this. Our trouble isn't that Palpatine is a dictator or that he has total control of the military. Our trouble is that, by and large—all exceptions aside—the citizens of our nation are willing to believe his lies, ignore his purges, and accept his rule in return for stability. They may not want him, but they don't want war. They want anything but war, and Palpatine has boxed us in so that war appears to be the only way out."
"If people understood—"
"They understand. They understand enough. If they hadn't been willing to trade the Jedi for stability, they wouldn't have accepted the Emperor's lies so easily."

―Senators Mon Mothma and Bail Prestor Organa during the early Imperial Era^[3]

The Galactic Empire was a dictatorship ruled by Darth Sidious, a Sith Lord whom the galaxy knew as Emperor Sheev Palpatine.

In 22 BBY,^[4] while Senator Padmé Amidala and Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker were staying on Naboo temporarily to avoid a potential assassination attempt on the former, they briefly discussed the corruption that had befallen the Galactic Republic and were wondering how to alleviate it. Skywalker responded that they probably would need to be made to resolve their differences by "someone wise," causing Amidala to guess that what Skywalker was proposing sounded similar to a dictatorship, with Skywalker not denying it and saying it may work.^[1]

Under the leadership of Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, the parliamentary Galactic Republic slowly turned into a dictatorship as the Chancellor used the Clone Wars as a pretext to amend the constitution and accrue more executive power.^[5] At the end of the conflict, the Republic was officially replaced by a formal dictatorship, the First Galactic Empire.^[2] Other dictatorial regimes included Hay-Zu's leadership over his fellow Patitites,^[6] and the rule of the Albee Dewaw—actually a group of DUM-series pit droids—over the Balnab. Both would ultimately be stopped by R2-D2 and C-3PO.^[7]