Democracy, threats and political repression in developing countries: Are democracies internally less violent?

Although previous research on the correlates of political repression has found a negative linear relationship between democracy and repression, we maintain that the relationship is more complex. We focus instead on the role of threats as a key precipitant to political repression and contend that scholars should attend to both non-linearities in analyses of political repression as well as Fein's (1995) argument that states with intermediate levels of democracy (ie semi-democracies) are more likely to be repressive. Such an orientation leads us to hypothesise that there is an inverted U relationship between regime type and political repression. In this article we examine this relationship for 91 less developed countries over the period 1979-92. The findings support the thesis and indicate that: (1) the level of threat is positively and significantly associated with political repression;(2) the level of threat has a greater impact than regime type on the likelihood of political repression; and (3) controlling for the level of threat, less developed states with intermediate levels of democracies--semi-democracies--have the highest levels of political repression.