The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion's 1996 novel, was her first work of fiction after Democracy. It develops several of the same political themes.

Didion is admired as an essayist as well as a novelist, and the work In The White Album, her 1979 essay collection, evolved from state of mind similar to the one which created Democracy

From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones is a popular wartime novel set in Honolulu in the period leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

A reading of Democracy, the 1880 novel by the nineteenth-century historian Henry Brooks Adams, helps to throw into sharper relief some of the cultural and political concerns which Didion's later novel of the same name explores.