We can only really speculate as to what the ordinary citizens thought about the empire. However, I think there is plenty of evidence from the films that the Empire had a deliberate strategy of ruling through fear and enforcing order through brutal repression.

For instance, after 3CP0 and R2D2 crash landed on Tatooine, the Empire were not simply content to interview the Jawas or the Lars family - they killed everyone who came in contact with the droids. Granted, they tried to make it look like the sand people did it, but it does hint at the fact that the empire does not trust ordinary people to co-operate with them.

Then Alderaan was destroyed for no apparent reason. You can't censor something like that, and the Empire is the only organization in the galaxy which would conceivably have the technological capacity to destroy a planet. The Death Star probably wasn't intended as a weapon for use against the rebels, but rather an instrument of fear - a threat to any would-be insurgents that dissidence is not tolerated, and that the Empire will go to any lengths to enforce its rule.

The citizens of the Empire almost certainly knew that they had a brutal and repressive government, that they had no real political representation at the highest levels of government, and that the Empire was prepared to kill innocent civilians to enforce its rule. They probably didn't go so far as to call them "evil".

But, as in the real world, knowing that you have a terrible government doesn't automatically mean that you will rise up against them. There would certainly have been some social class which was favoured by the Empire. They would have benefited from well-paid jobs within the elite tiers of the bureaucracy or business world, and would have stood to loose a lot from the collapse of the Empire. And then there would always be some members of the public who are incapable of thinking that their own government could do wrong so live instead in denial.

The out-of-universe answer is that George Lucas wasn't really thinking about these sorts of things when making the films, so the Galactic Civil War is really a very black and white story of good vs evil.

We can only really speculate as to what the ordinary citizens thought about the empire. However, I think there is plenty of evidence from the films that the Empire had a deliberate strategy of ruling through fear and enforcing order through brutal repression.

For instance, after 3CP0 and R2D2 crash landed on Tatooine, the Empire were not simply content to interview the Jawas or the Lars family - they killed everyone who came in contact with the droids. Granted, they tried to make it look like the sand people did it, but it does hint at the fact that the empire does not trust ordinary people to co-operate with them.

Then Alderaan was destroyed for no apparent reason. You can't censor something like that, and the Empire is the only organization in the galaxy which would conceivably have the technological capacity to destroy a planet. The Death Star probably wasn't intended as a weapon for use against the rebels, but rather an instrument of fear - a threat to any would-be insurgents that dissidence is not tolerated, and that the Empire will go to any lengths to enforce its rule.

The citizens of the Empire almost certainly knew that they had a brutal and repressive government, that they had no real political representation at the highest levels of government, and that the Empire was prepared to kill innocent civilians to enforce its rule. They probably didn't go so far as to call them "evil".

But, as in the real world, knowing that you have a terrible government doesn't automatically mean that you will rise up against them. There would certainly have been some social class which was favoured by the Empire. They would have benefited from well-paid jobs within the elite tiers of the bureaucracy or business world, and would have stood to lose a lot from the collapse of the Empire. And then there would always be some members of the public who are incapable of thinking that their own government could do wrong so live instead in denial.

The out-of-universe answer is that George Lucas wasn't really thinking about these sorts of things when making the films, so the Galactic Civil War is really a very black and white story of good vs evil.