With user-interface based games, you really need to feel a strong passion for the subject matter. Just like you need to be a football fan to enjoy Football Manager, you will need to be a fan of economics and/or politics in order to enjoy Democracy. There's no fancy graphics, just some menus and plenty of calculations going on behind the scenes.
The UI has nodes organised into various subjects and these are coloured red, blue or green to show the state. You can hover over them to see which other nodes have an effect on them, shown by red or green lines, with the directional movement showing cause/effect relationships, and the speed of movement illustrating the strength. Each node can have many positive and negative effects associated with them. The trouble is, the nodes aren't labelled in the same way. For example, there's a node for GDP which increasing this is a positive thing, so when you see green, this is a good thing. However, there's a node for pollution, and seeing a green line isn't a good thing since that means it is increasing. This causes a huge confusion and means you have to study the name, think if it is positive or not, then look at the colour. You end up seeing plenty of double negatives, and if you are trying to think about multiple nodes at once, it just becomes frustrating.
You gain political points each turn based on your party members influence. Each policy you implement or budget you tweak then costs you points. This means you can't make several changes at once.
Each turn, you will be presented with a dilemma. You will have to make decisions such as to ban or allow subliminal advertising, GM foods, fox hunting, same-sex marriage etc. and these decisions will have an effect on your country.
Any change to any of the nodes pleases or displeases your population. You can see how happy each category of voter is on the main screen, but each person in your population can come under several categories, so even this adds to the confusion. There's political-based categories like Patriot, Liberal, Socialist and other types of people like Drinkers, Smokers, Commuter, Religious, Parents etc. There's 10 different countries to play, and they all have different population sizes of voters and different initial problems.
From my experience, it always seemed that you were damned if you do, and damned if you don't. I chose a country that had a high amount of Capitalists. But after many 'turns' of the game, I had a major problem with Class Warfare. So I implemented housing benefits and cut the 'Tax Shelter' which then upset the Capitalists. What tends to happen is that no matter which group of people you upset, they seem to be extremists and will assassinate you. If you do survive long enough to make it to the next election, you may not get voted in for the next term and it is game over.
Before the election commences, you have to choose two promises from the list; examples include reducing pollution, taxes or unemployment. It seemed that you didn't really get much time to implement these policies, and this is supposed to be a huge influence on your votes.
The game seems to follow the same patterns, so you tweak some budgets, implement some policies, try and keep the budget balanced, but people get angry and then it's game over. I really wanted to like the game, but it seems confusing and overly punishing which hinders the enjoyment.