So, the bug with Horatio not being able to grow because their food penalty was bugged has been fixed and that's working great now, but now they still can't grow because they will always be in mutiny with the attending massive -75% penalty to growth.

These are some screenshots from only 40ish turns into the game:

As you can see, a majority of my population leaned militarist, so I went militarist.

But I guess that made everyone really unhappy.

+6 from reps in senate and -165 from reps not in senate? These penalties seem bugged. But if you think about it, tying this penalty to number of representatives not in the major party, basically means that disapproval will always outweigh approval in a dictatorship, even without the massive x3 multiplier on that disapproval. Since Horatio wants growth, it seems like dictatorship is always always always bad for them. Even if the bugged value gets fixed. I'm not sure what the solution is here; that's for smarter people than me to decide. I'm just expressing my thoughts here. Maybe I'm off base and dictatorship is supposed to have rampant rebellion?

The devs are aware of this and are planning to update that in the near future.  They have posted instructions if you want to play around with the numbers yourself prior to their update

WeaponizedCaffeine wrote:

Hi guys!

This is going to be addressed soon (I don't know when exactly though) but I think we're going to make something like -5 (if I am to believe the current value in the XML)

What you guys can do until the next patch is to tweak the values so you can play with the factions without being crushed by disapproval:

1. Open the directory Steam\steamapps\common\Endless Space 2\Public\Simulation

2. Open this file: SimulationDescriptors[ColonizedStarSystem].xml with a text editor of your choice such as Notepad++

3. Find this line (I think it should be around line 94)

<Property Name="HappinessPenaltyPerRepresentative"             BaseValue="15"  MinValue="Negative"/>

4. Change the BaseValue to the number you see fit! 

I hope this helps!