Aww, and I like Stabenow's mysteries so much! Some first tries should be decently buried.
The fault with this is that it's very perfunctory , late Heinlein to boot, without the voluminous pulp practice that at least smoothed out the pacing in Heinlein's tomes. The political, or rather emotional, system is the same; a bunch of omni-competent friends run everything according to Stern but Fair principles, except when the principles are hard to live up to, when they compliment each other on breaking them. For light comedy, they have (undescribed) excellent sex, which they then compliment themselves on in front of a knowing preteen. This is particularly Heinleinish and particularly creepy.
Stabenow's gang bows out and leaves for new frontiers when their new space colony gets its first load of democratic colonists, so they aren't the hypocritical thugs that I would expect in reality from a group with their non-principles, but I still don't believe their historical arguments from the US frontiers; it's convenient for the spacers that there aren't any indigenes to kill, but the analogy doesn't work backwards. It does seem that the colony has decided to renege on the building loan from a devastated and starving Earth. The government they're dealing with is treacherous, so maybe that's a moral wash.
I'm not sure the space details were carefully researched, because Stabenow's explanation of having many women in charge in space is that wages were equal in space but still sexist on Earth. Well, insofar as there are wages in space, which is elided more than a little. The irrational mechanisms don't extend? Tell Jerri Cobb or the telegraph operators. Happy thought, though.
ISBN: 0441757227
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