The Peter Principle
Stephen King was angry about leadership incompetency at the time of writing the novel and called Under The Dome an "apocalyptic version of the Peter Principle". The book focuses on what happens to a society when the wrong people are in power when it is a time that so desperately needs to have the right people on charge. The town of Chester's Mill is taken over by a legitimately bad character in Big Jim Rennie, the villain of the piece, but his cohorts such as Andy Sanders are more puppets than truly evil men. He was incompetent but not evil, and the theme of promoting the most incompetent to power runs throughout the novel.
Ecological Problems In Today's World
King always believed that although the characters in the novel live under a done, separated from the rest of the world, the reality in his opinion is that we all live under a dome. By seeming to isolate the novel's characters he was able to address in a microcosm the problems that we all face every day in fighting toxins in the air, depleting natural resources and dealing with the planet in isolation to the existence of other planets. The theme is also a subtle natural allegory representing the more global ecological issues that are experienced by the characters under the dome.
