The Last Thing He Wanted, a novel by Joan Didion published in 1996, marked her return to fiction after Democracy. This book explores many of the same political themes.

Didion is celebrated both as an essayist and a novelist. Her 1979 essay collection, The White Album, was born from a mindset similar to the one that inspired Democracy.

James Jones' From Here to Eternity (1951) is a well-known wartime novel set in Honolulu during the period leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack.

Reading Democracy, the 1880 novel by nineteenth-century historian Henry Brooks Adams, brings into focus some of the cultural and political issues that Didion's later novel with the same title examines.